I've used this for classes at Stanford. We used it in conjunction with EC2 and it was very handy for creating specific topologies that could be accessed from anywhere.
This is quite a surprise. As someone who worked on Windows for five years after undergrad and catching the tail end of Vista, people were thrilled when he was brought on board for Windows 7.
As a low level peon, I respected how he could get the org to ship on time. I think he'll be missed.