(Photo: Microsoft Games) J Allard has earned the reputation of "Microsoft’s Father of the Internet" because of his major influence on Microsoft Corp.’s online strategy during his 11 years with the company.As corporate vice president of the Xbox Platform, Allard oversees operating systems, hardware and online strategies, ensuring the best gameplay over the Internet will be incorporated into the game console.In 1993, Allard, with his memo to top executives, "Windows: The Killer Application for the Internet," led the charge to get Microsoft involved online. Allard and his team developed an FTP and Web server for the Windows NT operating system and created and managed ftp.microsoft.com and www.microsoft.com for close to a year before transitioning them to a more "official" home. He also started the company’s Web server initiative — Internet Information Server — which has become one of the most pervasive commercial Internet server products today, running some of the largest businesses on the Internet. Joining the company out of college in 1991, Allard began his career by laying out the company’s TCP/IP networking strategy and defining the Windows Sockets API, the key API for Internet computing. Allard participated with the Internet Engineering Task Force to develop several industry standards to drive widespread adoption of TCP/IP protocols, such as DHCP. He was elected to serve on the Internet Architecture Board in 1993 and consulted on future Internet protocols, which will be deployed in Internet2.Allard has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Boston University.