Bertrand Serlet

Who is Bertrand Serlet?

Bertrand Serlet, is a French software engineer; he worked first at the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique before leaving France for the United States in 1985. He is the former Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple, Inc.

Serlet holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Université Paris-Sud 11.

He is the former Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple Inc., where he worked from 1997 to 2011. He succeeded Avie Tevanian in the position in July 2003. In this position he was primarily responsible for the release of Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard. He led development of the Workspace manager in NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. He also led the Mac OS X team from its inception.

Before Apple he worked at Xerox PARC and NeXT.

Serlet spoke at WWDC 2006 on the perceived similarities between Mac OS X Tiger and Windows Vista, including comparing Apple's Aqua interface and Microsoft's 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 in Redmond, Washington.