At the time AOL was planning to shut down the Silicon Valley site and preferred to have everything in Virginia. Additionally they were already in talks with Time Warner (which internally we knew about).

There was a lot of redundancy in ops between AOL and Netscape, and AOL's talks with Time Warner made it apparent that their belief was that content and subscriber base was their future, not software... which is where I was at the time.

Right, this seems dumb as you're going to lose your best people first, since they're the ones knowing they'll have no issues finding something else on the open job market.