Gabriel J. "Gabe" Aul, (born August 5, 1972) is the

Vice President A vice president or vice-president, also director in British English, is an officer in government or business who is below the president (chief executive officer) in rank. It can also refer to executive vice presidents, signifying that the vi ...

of Oculus at Meta. He was previously the Corporate

(CVP) of Windows & Devices Group (WDG), Engineering Systems (1ES) team at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

. He was appointed as VP on 31 July 2015, following the launch of

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. The successor to Windows 8.1, it was Software release cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on July 2 ...

on 29 July 2015. He led the Windows Insider Program until June 1, 2016, where he was succeeded by Dona Sarkar.

Career

Aul started Microsoft's Security Response team for

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

in 1996. Aul was later part of a team that started Microsoft's Sustained Engineering group in

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, responsible for delivering hotfixes and

service pack In computing, a service pack comprises a collection of updates, fixes, or enhancements to a software program delivered in the form of a single installable package. Companies often release a service pack when the number of individual patches to a ...

s to customers. Aul led the effort to build Microsoft's first product

telemetry Telemetry is the in situ collection of measurements or other data at remote points and their automatic transmission to receiving equipment (telecommunication) for monitoring. The word is derived from the Greek roots ''tele'', 'far off', an ...

systems. Before then,

had no idea about how many problems were occurring on customer systems, nor were they able to debug them. Aul led part of the team creating the technologies to allow upload of crash, hang, and other failure data (

Windows Error Reporting Windows Error Reporting (WER) (codenamed Watson) is a crash reporter, crash reporting technology introduced by Microsoft with Windows XP and included in later Windows versions and Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6.0. Not to be confused with the Dr. W ...

) as well as Microsoft's anonymous data collection system for usage data (Customer Experience Improvement Program.) Aul won several engineering awards, patents, and published a paper based on this work. After

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, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

, Aul started the Program Management team working on Performance for Windows, with Michael Fortin who led the Development team. Aul and his team spent 3 years working on Windows 7, the first edition of Windows ever that used less resources (memory, CPU, disk) than its predecessor. Aul was promoted to Director and expanded his team to include reliability and security, and for Windows 8 they bested Windows 7 on those dimensions. For Windows 10; Aul was running an even further expanded team (adding

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to his other “

Fundamentals Fundamental may refer to: * Foundation of reality * Fundamental frequency, as in music or phonetics, often referred to as simply a "fundamental" * Fundamentalism, the belief in, and usually the strict adherence to, the simple or "fundamental" idea ...

” role) and was able to lead the effort to enable Flighting and Feedback for

's "Windows as a

Service Service may refer to: Activities * Administrative service, a required part of the workload of university faculty * Civil service, the body of employees of a government * Community service, volunteer service for the benefit of a community or a ...

" strategy. As part of that, Aul started the Windows Insider Program and got to be the face of the effort for a while. Gabriel stepped down from his role of running the Windows Insider Program on 1 June 2016, citing that he couldn't "give 100%" to both the Insider Program and his other job on the Engineering Systems Team at once. On September 8, 2017, Gabriel Aul celebrated his 25th anniversary working at

. In 2019, Gabe Aul has left

for Facebook's Oculus team.

Patents

# Method and system for downloading updates for software installation - Filed: September 16, 1999 , Issued: December 10, 2002 # Method and system for an incidental feedback platform - Filed: April 22, 2005 , Issued: June 24, 2008 # Device emulation to facilitate data transfer - Filed: March 9, 2006 , Issued: January 10, 2012

References

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External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Aul, Gabe 1972 births Living people Microsoft people