On June 17th 1997 I was fired from Microsoft for sarcastically apologizing to a Microsoft executive after accusing her of incompetence.
http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/01/06/getting-fired-from-microsoft/
I took a long, much needed, vacation leaving Microsoft to its own devices to conquer the Internet. While I had been working on DirectX, I had hired a team of developers out of Edmark ( a children’s educational game company in that era) to build the Windows Game SDK Game Sampler CD for me for Christmas 1995. The team was run by a former marine named Jason Hall. Jason and his team worked out of offices I provided them on Microsoft campus building the Windows 95 Game Sampler CD before, with my assistance, they raised some venture capital and spun out to start their own game studio called Monolith Productions. Using their very early experience with DirectX development, they began work on what they called DirectEngine, one of the first first-person 3D shooter engines built from scratch on Direct3D. *Monolith went on to use the technology to build MMOG’s, sold the studio to Warner Brothers and after several years of running Warner Bro’s Game Studios, Hall went on to start his own TV studio and the Jace Hall show.
Jason was good enough to lend me office space at Monolith Studios to work out of while I figured out what I wanted to do next with my life. We talked a lot about online game publishing at that time. The dotcom era was heating up and I was asked to write a tech column for Boot Magazine (Now MaxiumPC) owned by Imagine Media (IGN) located in the Bay Area. In the course of working for Imagine Media and the early development of IGN I was exposed to Silicon Valley investors who were eager to invest in hot new online technology companies and founders. I was approached by multiple investors who told me that if I wanted to start a tech company they would be eager to support me. I had little idea at the time as to just how extraordinarily fortunate I was to be unemployed and famous for gaming technology at that precise moment in Internet history. The dotcom boom had hit Silicon Valley hard but had not really reached Redmond Washington yet…
I sold my Microsoft stock and bought a house with a huge basement near Monolith with the expectation that I would operate my early startup business there until I had a better idea as to how fast I could grow. Being fired had wiped out millions of dollars’ worth of unvested stock options but I had enough to get started. I contacted an old friend from my publishing days named Jeremey Kenyon… who you will find commenting frequently on this blog. Jeremy moved to the US to become my CTO and took up residence in my basement. Jez was a genius of unprecedented intelligence and a bottomless capacity for debate. My first employee was a young kid from Kansas named Mike Demond who I also relocated to Redmond to be my web designer. Daevid Vincent from Boot Magazine also joined us in Redmond as did a young Web Designer from Seattle named Travis Baldree (founder of Runic Studios, years later).
I was working on a much more ambitious business plan, but in the meantime we did some contracting business to keep the lights on while I worked on an early business plan for Pandora.com. Well… that was the early name for the company but Jez didn’t like it because the story smacked of negative association. The name was a reference to a curious little girl releasing all the evil in the universe from a box…. So I changed the company name to WildTangent and released the domain name. (tell me about it) WildTangent’s first customer was… wait for it… Microsoft. Oh this story gets much funnier.
My abrupt departure from Microsoft had created something of a mess. The success of the DirectX Media prototype… resulting in the DirectX Media SDK… had led to Brad Silverberg and John Ludwig authorizing my old DirectX buddies Eric Engstrom and Craig Eisler getting the charter to develop a new media rich super browser called Chrome. Well… it was called Chrome initially until Microsoft lawyers concluded that the Chrome name for a browser could not be trademarked so it was renamed ChromeEffects… or ChromeFX. DirectX… ChromeFX… get it? The problem was that I had been the chief proponent of creating such a browser and had been responsible for much of the marketing strategy, evangelism and whitepapers written for DirectX Media as well as producing the early technology demos for it. Eric Engstrom contacted me and hired WildTangent to provide the same services for the early ChromeEffects project that was just getting underway. My new team of junior web designers would be the first to pioneer the art of building ultra-media rich web pages for the Internet. Eric’s attempts to hire other web design firms to produce such demos had been greeted with failure. Ordinary web developers had no idea how to design rich media web UI.
Eric wanted me to come up with a demo for ChromeEffects which would decisively illustrate how revolutionary the application of such technology could be for the Internet for practical applications other than gaming. After much consultation with Jez, we came up with mapping. Jeremey and Mike Demond (the kid from Kansas) designed a crude streaming map demo using… wait for it… the undocumented DirectX Java wrapper we had secretly shipped with IE4.0. The demo, called MapStream, understandably blew people’s minds. I of course immediately filed patents on the technique for achieving smooth scrolling, panning and zooming maps in 2D and 3D in a browser over a modem. Those of you who use Google Maps today will recognize the technology as I later sold the patents to Google after a bidding war between Yahoo, Google and Microsoft and used the cash to fund WildTangent’s foray into online game publishing. WildTangent, contracted to Microsoft, went on to develop a wide range of amazing web demos using the DirectX Media prototype and later the ChomeEffects alpha technology including stock tracking UI, 3D car and real-estate ads, virtual books and magazines with 3D page turning effects and of course games. Within Microsoft’s browser group it was widely believed that the release of such technology would forever obliterate Netscape from the Internet simply because once people realized how web pages could look, nobody would go back to simple text and hyperlinks. No evil monopolist strategy would be required to beat Netscape, people would voluntarily embrace Microsoft’s extremely innovative new super-browser.
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From: Alex St. John [mailto:astjohn@accessone.com]
Sent: Friday, May 15, 1998 2:33 AM
To: ‘ericeng@microsoft.com’
Subject: FW: Chrome White Paper
They seem to be very happy with my work, and have asked me to write all of their white papers from
now on. See you soon bro.
———-
From: Alex St. John[SMTP:astjohn@accessone.com]
Sent: Friday, May 15, 1998 2:32 AM
To: ‘v-kcarr@microsoft.com’
Cc: ‘audragm@microsoft.com’
Subject: Chrome White Paper
Your white paper has been completed. I will drop it off tomorrow, hopefully before 1pm. If I can’t get
in, I leave it at the front desk. I’ve provided two floppies with .zip files containing all of my work and
the .bmp files associated with the images in the doc. I will be on email in europe via
astjohn@accessone.com if you need any changes made. I will contact Boot and tell them to get in
touch with you guys about Bill. If I don’t see you tomorrow, I’ll see you in a few weeks, and I’ll bring
you something nice from a far away place.
–Alex
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*A note to Eric Engstrom reporting that the IE marketing group at Microsoft was pleased with the whitepaper work I had produced for them on the Chrome browser.
As amazing as the technology was, I was secretly disappointed with it simply because it was still vastly LESS powerful than the simple Java-DirectX wrapper we had initially envisioned had been. ChromEffects was, in my opinion, unnecessarily crippled for developing online games which I believed would be the biggest early market for such technology. Mike Demond had, for his own amusement, developed a stunning 3D version of Asteroids that ran beautifully in IE 4.0 using the DirectX Java wrapper. We could not replicate the demo with Chrome which was killing me.
On the heels of this work, Microsoft contracted WildTangent to produce even more demos, whitepapers and sample code and offered us offices on Microsoft’s campus for my people to work closely with the ChromEffects team which was now in full swing. Three days after submitting my whitepaper to Microsoft, the DOJ filed suit.
http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/1998/1764.htm
Not surprisingly it took time for the impact of this event to sink in at Microsoft. For several months afterwards it was business as usual at Microsoft… with one noticeable exception. Eric Engstrom was increasingly MIA, constantly involved in internal “meetings” about things he couldn’t discuss. By September 1998 I had 5 employees living in my basement and a total of 8 employees working out of Microsoft offices on ChromEffects demo’s and sample code. Rumors of the seriousness of the DOJ trial were spreading within Microsoft and a pall was gradually falling over the entire company. I was regrettably distracted at the time due to an unfortunate pop-tart incident that had left me incapacitated.
Despite my own struggles with weight, I kept a stash of snack foods and beverages in the basement for my hard working team. While “attempting” to stick to a diet I succumbed to an irresistible craving for Cherry Pop-tarts at 2am in the morning and crept downstairs while everyone was sleeping to help myself to a couple. I didn’t want to wake anybody up, so I popped two Cherry Pop-tarts into the toaster in the darkness. When I heard the toaster “pop”, I seized them, planning to scurry upstairs to consume my little vice in secret only to belatedly discover that the frosting was molten hot. The cherry pop-tarts fused with my fingers and I shrieked at the top of my lungs. When people woke up abruptly to my screaming and turned on the lights, they found me hopping around the basement with a cherry pop-tart welded to each thumb.
After much ice and an excruciating pop-tartectomy I had my hands bandaged and was rendered unable to code or type for several weeks. This event was a serious setback for WildTanent as we were on a tight deadline to deliver many documents that I was responsible for writing. Not being one to tolerate excuses for failure to deliver, I spent many hours with my thumbs submerged in ice water while trying to peck out whitepapers on my laptop without removing my thumbs from their ice bath. It was while I was doing this that Jez returned from our Microsoft offices to report that ChromEffects was being shut down and that all contractors were being laid off. We had to evacuate our people and computers from Microsoft before our card-keys ceased to work. Eric mournfully reported to me that Microsoft had decided that shipping a Netscape killing browser during the DOJ trial would not help Microsoft’s case and that HE, given his many dealings with Apple and RealNetworks at the time, had been selected as one of Microsoft’s twelve witnesses to testify at the trial. He told me to get any remaining invoices we had into his office for payment asap because very shortly he would become unavailable, as all of his time would be fully consumed preparing for the trial.
To be continued…
PS> For those of you who may be concerned, it took about six weeks for me to grow new thumb prints, which interestingly were identical to their predecessors despite being completely obliterated…
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