Director of the Client-Server Applications Group in the Network Business Group; Hare reported to him directly, and on a matrix line to Ballmer
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Director of the Client-Server Applications Group at Microsoft, part of the Network Business Group, in 1991–92 — the group Jonathan Hare sat in for his summer placement in Building 1 and the part-time year that followed (S-180). He was Hare's direct report line; the matrix line, for anything touching Windows, ran to Steve Ballmer. In S-154, dictated before the name came back to him, Hare remembered him as the group's head, the only Black executive he saw at Microsoft who was not serving food, and a man who always wore a suit so as not to be mistaken for a copier or services salesman — 'Dwayne, I think.' The surname came on 31 August 2026, with a LinkedIn address and a pasted AI result, which the record keeps in S-180 as what it is.
What Hare did under him: he was the only person assigned to the nascent Asynchronous Communication Server team, for which Microsoft had no product. The job was to evaluate the asynchronous communication servers on the market — an alphabet of protocols, NetBEUI, IPX, TCP/IP and the rest, against a large SNA Comm Server group reselling IBM's — find three or four viable candidates, and negotiate a free licensing deal under which Microsoft would embed the winner's technology in Windows and Windows NT as a native feature, leaving the vendor the high end of the market. The terms were not attractive, so the plan was to bid the candidates against each other; whatever Microsoft made native would dominate and the rest would die. 'That's what Steve Ballmer told me to tell them, anyway.' Everything sold on the server side then ran on OS/2; Microsoft reorganized whenever a group reached three hundred people.
Public record, at web grade, from search snippets the integrator could not open: a Seattle-area executive with more than twenty-five years in technology, and an executive bio listing senior positions at Microsoft, TRW, Hughes Aircraft, DMR Group, US Connect and Network Commerce and the presidency of FNIS in 2003. That these are the same man is the record's identification, consistent with Hare's account, and his own word would settle it.
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Dwayne led the group; the product-management strategy for embedding asynchronous networking in Windows went up to Ballmer, whom Hare met about five times. The summer job became a part-time year, run over a beta of Remote Access Server into Microsoft's proprietary in-house network and distributed file system from Stanford.
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Building 1, 1991 — the nucleus, and where the coordination problem was named
Open →the matrix line above himThe executive crucible
Open →Building 1, the same summerArchitect of Windows NT, in the next chair
Open →the SQL Server the group resoldMark Hoffman and Bob Epstein's company; Erik Freed architected the distributed database that never shipped
Open →his direct report, 1991–92Consilient Architect — the node this graph was seeded from
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
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