Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online

OFFBEAT

Tom Evslin on Bill Gates, the birth of Exchange, and dragging Ma Bell onto the web

Tom Evslin drove the WorldNet project at AT&T and helped develop what became Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. He was at Microsoft when the company was still working out what to do about this newfangled internet thing.

Evslin describes himself as one of Microsoft's "internet radicals" in the early 1990s, when the company was developing Exchange Server to fend off the threat from Lotus Notes.

"Bill Gates was willing to put lots of effort and money into Exchange because he was very afraid of Lotus Notes," Evslin says. "He felt that Lotus Notes could become a platform the way that Windows was, which would be an enormous threat to Microsoft. And so he saw Exchange as a Notes killer."

Evslin saw Exchange differently "because I was an email guy." He and Microsoft's other "internet radicals" wanted the upcoming products delayed until they had been made relevant to the internet. Gates disagreed.

"Bill said, with some truth, that we were probably behind schedule anyway, always looking for an excuse to be late. So we go ahead with the next launch of products, including Office, Exchange, and NT, then worry about the internet afterward, which I thought was a mistake."

Evslin was fascinated by the internet's potential and disappointed by Gates' stance. He was responsible for gateways in Exchange, services that connect one mail system to another. Some did things like connecting to CompuServe. Others linked to MCI Mail, one of the first commercial email services in the US, "which I had done a client for," Evslin says.

"We had one little gateway that we hadn't put much work into, which was called an SMTP gateway, which connected SMTP mail, which was used on the internet. Which itself wasn't widely used."

So, was Gates right? Only briefly. While Microsoft's corporate clients insisted communication over the internet was "not safe" and "not secure," Evslin says: "All of a sudden we got a huge number of requests for this SMTP gateway. And when I looked into it, I found that more and more email was going over the internet."

The official corporate stance might have been one of "nope," but employees had other ideas. "Their engineers were communicating on the internet, and they never understood that, or didn't understand that at the time," Evslin says.

And then there was what would become Outlook. "From the beginning, we wanted the client for Exchange to be able to support graphics, to be able to support fonts, so that you could format an email in the same way that you could format a Word document.

"Where we didn't go far enough is we still had two separate formatting engines, so the Word and Outlook client never merged as I thought they should have."

Soon after Gates chose to launch the products before adding deeper internet integration, AT&T invited Evslin "to come and develop their internet strategy." Back then, Evslin says, AT&T didn't really have a clear plan for the internet. The company had tinkered with proprietary networks, but Evslin reckoned AT&T should become an ISP. "AT&T always had illusions about being a content provider," he says.

Evslin also favored all-you-can-eat pricing, which smaller providers had attempted but AT&T had yet to try. "There was a lot of debate internally, people saying 'you can't launch a new service in less than seven years.'"

Considering how quickly things were moving – and still are – seven years was a lifetime. "I said, 'the solution to that is launch it fast and then adapt.'"

WorldNet offered straightforward internet access to customers accustomed to portals, proprietary networks, and some heart-stopping telephone bills. Demand grew so quickly that AT&T had to control sign-ups lest the service earn the "America On Hold" nickname occasionally and unkindly applied to America Online.

With the internet in the ascendant, Evslin became interested in another technology: voice over IP. This, he acknowledges, "was an impossible sale inside AT&T."

And so, in 1997, Evslin moved on again to found ITXC, a wholesale VoIP carrier. ®