Bertrand Serlet (; born 1960) is a French

software engineer Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term ''p ...

and businessman; he worked first at the ''Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique'' (

INRIA The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name ''Institut de recherche en informatiq ...

) before leaving France for the United States in 1985. He was the Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

Education

Serlet graduated from

École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay The École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay (also ENS Paris-Saclay or Normale Sup' Paris-Saclay), formerly ENS Cachan, is a grande école and a constituent member of Paris-Saclay University. It was established in 1892. It is located in Gif-sur-Yv ...

. He holds a PhD in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

from the Université Paris-Sud 11.

Career

Serlet was the former Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple Inc., where he worked from 1997 to 2011. He succeeded

Avie Tevanian Avadis "Avie" Tevanian (born 1961) is an American software engineer. At Carnegie Mellon University, he was a principal designer and engineer of the Mach operating system (also known as the Mach Kernel). He leveraged that work at NeXT Inc. as the ...

in the position in July 2003. In this position he was primarily responsible for the release of

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

(including 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard). He led development of the Workspace manager in

NeXTSTEP NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of proprieta ...

and

OPENSTEP OpenStep is a defunct object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification for a legacy object-oriented operating system, with the basic goal of offering a NeXTSTEP-like environment on non-NeXTSTEP operating systems. OpenStep was ...

. Before joining Apple he worked at

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

and

NeXT Next may refer to: Arts and entertainment Film * ''Next'' (1990 film), an animated short about William Shakespeare * ''Next'' (2007 film), a sci-fi film starring Nicolas Cage * '' Next: A Primer on Urban Painting'', a 2005 documentary film Lit ...

. Serlet spoke at

WWDC The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is usually held at Apple Park in California. The event is usually used to showcase new software and technologies in t ...

2006 on the perceived similarities between Mac OS X Tiger and

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

, including comparing Apple's

Aqua Aqua is the Latin word for water. It is used in many words which relate to water, such as aquatic life. In English, it may also refer to: Arts * Aqua (color), a greenish-blue color Business * Aqua (skyscraper), an 82-story residential skysc ...

interface and Microsoft's

Aero Aero is a Greek prefix relating to flight and air. In British English, it is used as an adjective related to flight (e.g., as a shortened substitute for aeroplane). Aero, Ærø, or Aeros may refer to: Aeronautics Airlines and companies * Aero ...

interface. He poked fun at the apparent visual similarities and referenced a 2004 WWDC banner that read, "Redmond, start your photocopiers" — a reference to Microsoft headquarters, which is located in Redmond, Washington. He also spoke at

2009 and gave an in-depth demonstration of

Snow Leopard The snow leopard (''Panthera uncia''), also known as the ounce, is a Felidae, felid in the genus ''Panthera'' native to the mountain ranges of Central Asia, Central and South Asia. It is listed as Vulnerable species, Vulnerable on the IUCN Red ...

, which included further references to Microsoft's Windows operating system — claiming that

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...

is just another version of their widely criticized

Vista Vista usually refers to a distant view. Vista may also refer to: Software *Windows Vista, the line of Microsoft Windows client operating systems released in 2006 and 2007 * VistA, (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) ...

release, citing the ongoing use of the

Windows Registry The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores low-level settings for the Microsoft Windows operating system and for applications that opt to use the registry. The kernel, device drivers, services, Security Accounts Manager, and use ...

, DLLs, the

User Account Control User Account Control (UAC) is a mandatory access control enforcement feature introduced with Microsoft's Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems, with a more relaxed

(UAC) subsystem and existence of an interactive disk defragmenter. On March 23, 2011, Apple announced that Serlet was leaving the company "to focus less on products and more on science." ''Business Insider'' reported Serlet had founded a startup in

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

called Upthere along with other former Apple employees. In November, 2012, Upthere raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Elevation Partners, and Google Ventures. Upthere was acquired by Western Digital on August 28, 2017. In July 2012 he joined the board of directors of Parallels, Inc. In 2015, he co-founded data center technology company

Fungible In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable, and each of whose parts is indistinguishable from any other part. Fungible tokens can be exchanged or replaced; for exam ...

with former

Juniper Networks Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including routers, switches, network management software, network security product ...

' CEO

Pradeep Sindhu Pradeep Sindhu is an Indian-American business executive. He is the chairman, chief development officer (CDO) and co-founder of data center technology company Fungible. Previously, he co-founded Juniper Networks, where he was the chief scientis ...

. In an interview with INRIA, he shared details about Grokable, a small stealth startup he is working on. According to Serlet, Grokable is "a purely scientific and highly innovative project that involves imitating animal intelligence."

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Serlet, Bertrand 1961 births Living people Apple Inc. employees Apple Inc. executives Paris-Sud 11 University alumni Scientists at PARC (company)