As St. John had suspected, not everybody was happy about the success the DirectX team was having. According to St. John, there were still enemies within Microsoft who would throw roadblocks in the way or try to seize control of their projects. Direct3D was just getting going, and the NT, OpenGL and even the Talisman group were making life a challenge. So it was St. John’s role to be the heat shield for Engstrom and Eisler and let them keep working on Chrome without interference from within.
While OpenGL was an established graphics API, Talisman was an internal Microsoft technology that came out of Microsoft Research, which had been started by Nathan Myhrvold in 1991 with the sole purpose of exploring new technologies that would allow Microsoft to stay ahead of its competition and build up a portfolio of patents. Unlike every other division, Microsoft Research, or just Research as people referred to it, had no requirement to develop products or to make money directly. They were pure research. But Myhrvold realized that research without products would not be as effective as it should be, and so Research often worked directly with product groups to implement their technologies into practical implementations.
One of those implementations was Talisman, a clever and somewhat complicated technology designed to speed up 3D animation rendering by only requiring a program to re-render the parts of an image that actually changed, and not the whole image. By doing so, it saved resources and sped up the process, in theory quite dramatically.
Bill Gates was intrigued by Talisman and supported it, but members of the DirectX team, including St. John and evangelist Ty Graham hated it. There are many stories about the internal battles over Talisman, with rationale provided on both sides of the argument, but in the end, Talisman took too long to get to market, and by the time it was ready to be released, the graphics market had passed it by. For that and other reasons, Talisman was ultimately abandoned. OpenGL, on the other hand, was a different story. The battles between advocates of OpenGL and Direct3D raged for many months, escalating when graphics guru John Carmack wrote what was to become an infamous post on a user group that blasted Direct3D and fully endorsed OpenGL. This came as a shock to the DirectX team because previously Carmack had been very supportive.
The Carmack post ignited some acrimonious argument over emails and raised a lot of questions about which standard Microsoft should adopt.