As a CIO in the late 1990’s I became intrigued by the concept of creating a web-based portal for my retail stores. Today we would call this an intranet. Sores would be able to access all kinds of valuable information such as their flash sales, product information, and store operating procedures. These were typically delivered by mail at a high cost.  Most point of sale (POS) systems at the time were run on Microsoft DOS which couldn’t run the HTML code required for browser-based portals.

I approached Microsoft for a solution and they informed me that they were already working on a retail development environment called Activestore, which ran on Windows NT, that would enable my vision. I joined their Activestore advisory board and agreed to pilot the product.

Unfortunately, the initiative died on the vine.  Microsoft didn’t understand the retail industry and the nuances of implementing technology in a distributed retail store environment. They were making a play to become a leader in the retail industry without any retail experts.

A few months after this article was released, Microsoft approached me to build their first Retail Consulting business unit to fill this industry knowledge gap.  I started on June 7th, 1999.