In January 2001 Lewin was named vice president of Microsoft’s then new .NET platform. Working from Microsoft’s Mountain View, California campus – Sillicon Valley, his job was to bring start-ups and partners onto the .NET Framework.
Silicon Valley was (and still is) hostile ground for Microsoft. The center of the US tech business was then, and remains today, home of some of Microsoft’s most staunch rivals – Apple, Amazon, Borland, Google, Oracle, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo!