I was the architect for a major Microsoft partner adoption of The Microsoft Network (MSN) back in the early 90's. I'd just finished our companies BBS project a

I was the architect for a major Microsoft partner adoption of The Microsoft Network (MSN) back in the early 90's. I'd just finished our companies BBS project a few years prior, followed by our FTP software service and WWW support services. I did the whole MSN thing, complete with a training camp in Redmond and attending their party on The Queen Mary where I met Bill Gates. The whole time it was very surreal because in contrast with my work on our web solutions, working on MSN was like taking very significant steps backwards. I even walked out of one of the trainings after they couldn't point me towards a way to automate content uploads to MSN. For all my work, I was then subpoenaed by Congress to provide my perspective on Microsoft locking out third-party browsers from Windows. Luckily the company lawyers took care of that one for me. I very much got the sense that a lot of Microsoft employee's knew the game was over, but they had too much momentum behind MSN to turn back.