In January of '95 I left NYNEX Research and Development and started working for Macmillan Digital USA. It was a new company from an old publisher that meant to turn various print products into multimedia. No one in publishing took the Internet seriously at this time, so the idea was to produce CD-ROMS (read-only data discs) for a mass-market reference audience. In 1995 the format was used primarily for game distribution; this would "shift the paradigm" and rapidly return massive revenue from a new kind of product.

"Best of Breed" contained the searchable contents of six canine reference books, including The Complete Dog Book, a perennial best-selling title for Macmillan. There were over a thousand 256-color images, a primitive software tool that would help with picking a breed, and hundreds of postage-stamp-sized Quicktime videos illustrating training techniques and showing pure-bred dogs in competition. I managed a vendor out of Portland that built the thing and a New York team that developed the content. It cost about a half-million to put it together. In the five years I worked for MDU I never had that kind of budget again.

We had a comprehensive product but there was absolutely no market for it. The move to cost-free content on the web was starting to take off; that was the actual paradigm shift. (Publishers still haven't figured out how to monentize it.) We thought the CD-ROM format with its many pictures and videos would never be matched by the internet. Imagine, video on the web!

Out of all the discs I produced for Macmillan this was my favorite, something I considered a genuine tool for historians. One could select almost any day of the conflict and find the appropriate headline from The New York Times along with the CBS Evening News broadcast from the same evening. We developed a whole series of new maps and licensed hundreds of images, including the iconic shot we used on the box cover.

I had a great New York designer who could also code and together we did the production for a fraction of the cost of Best of Breed. It became so much easier to make changes! I loved working with the people from The Times and CBS who were proud of their efforts and there to make something good; CBS even submitted it for a Peabody. And the cartographers were a gas—the word droll had been invented just for them.

Even though the budget was smaller we still couldn't sell Vietnam in sufficient numbers to make a profit. Libraries bought a few but there was little interest in the mass end of the market. We continued to churn out titles for the next five years and every year the budgets got smaller. When the company was dissolved in 1999 I was the last employee, and I got a nice set of steak knives.