I worked with Vic briefly during my Developer Relations Group (DRG) time as an evangelist at Microsoft during the late 1990s. Vic was one of the pioneering drivers behind the evangelism teams at Microsoft and was the guy ultimately responsible for sites like channel9.msdn.com and who Scoble rolled up to. Simply put, Vic ‘gets’ community and ‘gets’ how to create fans for the products he works on.
From the C-NET article it sounds like Vic is taking a year off and then joining Google. A lot changes in a year — personally I don’t know if I could sit still that long!
The who’s who list for Google is getting pretty silly. I guess it’s the, “throw a bunch of smart people together, give them atonomy (and cash), and then sit back and watch’. I like that…
Good luck at Google Vic!
