It was a long, long time ago… It was a time of a great civil war between the Outlook/Office and the Exchange teams… It was a time of great browser wars and much uncertainty... It was an era in which ancient languages such as C++ ruled the galaxy and web browsers weren't considered application development platforms.

It was during this time, I had the opportunity to work on a product that would help redefine web based e-mail and more importantly define what web applications were capable of. I was one of the first developers on the Outlook Web Access team (or as it was known back then, the Exchange Web Client). During 1996-1998, I worked with Bob Gering (R.I.P.) and Jim Van Eaton, where I created the original appointment / meeting request form, the contact form, and the Java date picker. Needless to say, it was the highlight of my professional career at Microsoft.

Unfortunately, during this great civil war, my career ended up following a different path, than that of my good friends, and I joined "the confederacy". During this period, I ended up working on random Office apps in native code, as I meandered around aimlessly from group to group, either working on products I wasn't passionate about or working for managers who were mediocre. After a few years of my career going nowhere, I left Microsoft.

During this time, my friend Qui-Gon Jim (Van Eaton) became the Jedi Master of the Outlook Web Access team, and under his stewardship OWA became the first web application to use the XMLHTTP technology, which is today referred to as AJAX and continued to grow its proud legacy into the great application you know and love today. Unless of course, you use a browser that doesn't suck, in which case you'll never know how good OWA really is, which brings us to the present day.

You see, Microsoft fumbled the ball during the dot com bust. After building a huge market share & mind share lead in the browser wars, Microsoft disbanded the IE team and essentially walked away from improving its client side internet technologies (fortunately, they invented .net during this time, and improved it's server side software, but IE was essentially trapped in a time capsule from 2001-2005). I suppose at the time it seemed like a smart move since AOL purchased Netscape, and neither AOL, Netscape nor the Mozilla foundation were going anywhere. Furthermore, Steve Jobs second coming at Apple was still in its early stages and Google was merely a good search engine and not yet a verb.

Except, at some point during that era, we hit a strategic inflection point. Firefox got invented, kept improving and kept innovating. All while the majority of the former IE team was trapped in the Vista tar pit. In a few short years, IE 6 went from first to worst in mind share, due to the Firefox team playing the tortoise to Microsoft's hare. Even worse, Google took advantage of Microsoft's internet client myopia and made a web e-mail client that worked great on IE and Firefox (and gave away gigabytes of storage space to sweeten the deal). Shortly afterward Apple released Safari, Google released Google Maps, Microsoft released Virtual earth, and the Web was re-born.

Anyway, the OWA team kept innovating during this era of uncertainty, and ended up with a great AJAX client that only worked on IE because when it was designed 1) there were no other browsers that supported AJAX / DHTML except IE and 2) there were no standards to follow because there were no other browsers that had implemented them yet. I suppose myopia played a role as well, but by the time the other browsers gained mind share, the OWA's development plans were already set in Carbonite.

When I was on the OWA team, we supported IE & Netscape equally well (perhaps equally poorly is a better choice of words, because web browsers and web applications were so much simpler & less complex back then). However, during the past 10 years, we've witnessed the rise and fall of Internet Explorer (and possible redemption) and the World Wide Web is once again a chaotic and exciting area of uncertainty and innovation.

So, with that back story, I am now announcing that this epic tale, is taking a new, if small, unexpected twist. Qui-Gon Jim has asked this former Jedi Knight to return to the Rebel Alliance, where we both hope we can defeat Darth Page and Darth Brin of the Google Empire. For the past few years, I've been peacefully living on Tatooine, but Qui-Gon Jim's call to battle was too compelling to resist.

With a lot of hard work, and a little luck, perhaps I shall become a Jedi Master and re-join the Jedi Council. If nothing else, perhaps I'll merely play Han Solo for a few months and pay off Jabba the Hutt.

One thing is for certain, the light saber fights with the Sith are going to be fun to watch and I'm looking forward to seeing something other than IE 6 bugs for next several months. Wish me luck in my old / new job on Microsoft's Outlook Web Access team!