Tom Evslin, an early Microsoft "internet radical," has recounted his role in developing what became Exchange Server and Outlook, and later in building AT&T's internet strategy through the WorldNet project. At Microsoft in the early 1990s, Evslin pushed for the company to embrace the internet sooner, but Bill Gates prioritised launching Exchange, Office and NT on schedule to counter the threat from Lotus Notes, planning to address internet integration afterwards. The account matters as a window into how two of the era's biggest tech firms were caught off guard by the internet's rapid rise despite having engineers already relying on it internally.

Evslin, who built Exchange's mail gateways, noted that an under-resourced SMTP gateway saw a surge in demand as more email shifted to internet-based systems, even as Microsoft's corporate clients publicly dismissed the internet as unsafe. He also revealed that Outlook and Word were meant to share a single formatting engine but never fully merged, a design gap he still regrets. After leaving Microsoft, Evslin moved to AT&T, where he pushed the company to become an internet service provider with flat-rate, all-you-can-eat pricing, despite internal scepticism that a new service couldn't launch in under seven years.