Exploring Alternative History | Platformonomics

Excerpt from an extensive and insightful Charles Fitzgerald perspective post

"I don’t think people appreciate how close Microsoft came to completely imploding in 2000. Employees woke up every day to relentlessly negative headlines from the DoJ case. It was not yet evident that the surreal world of the dot com bubble had ended, and even if you weren’t being wooed daily to join revenue-less startups with ridiculous valuations, you felt obligated to explore options.
Forum 2000 changed all that internally. It provided a sense of purpose and showed how the whole could be greater than the sum of the parts. Soon after Forum 2000, Mark Lucovsky, one of the key contributors to Windows NT, the inventor of Win32 (he also likes to brag he invented “DLL Hell”) and one of the company’s distinguished engineers, showed up with an architecture to make the Forum 2000 videos real (the ability to actually implement had not been the foremost consideration in painting the vision…). This lead to .NET My Services (aka hailStorm) which was announced in the spring of 2001."

Exploring Alternative History | Platformonomics