At the time, AOL and CompuServe were the primary online venues, and the introduction of the Web to mass consumers was about to begin, even as low-bandwidth, dialup connections dominated.
But with scripting capability for HTML yet to be demonstrated, it was to be a means to serve dynamic, media-rich applications and documents that contained processing logic, similar to what a user would experience in a desktop environment.
The technology had already been demonstrated in Microsoft's dial-up service at the time, MSN, and plans were in progress to port it to Internet use over a dedicated protocol, but work on the platform was cancelled due to the overwhelming move to the HTML/WWW/Internet standards commercialized and consuming the computing world, for example by Netscape at the time, and the need for backend, server-side scripting technologies which were lacking.
In 1995, Microsoft hence refocused its efforts for online development around the Web/HTML standards, including ASP and ActiveX, and the "Blackbird" designer was refashioned into Visual InterDev.
To give developers more flexibility, Microsoft planned to include a utility that would allow conversion between BDF and BML, as well as HTML, in any direction.
Microsoft also advertised that Blackbird would take advantage of features within Windows 95 like shortcuts, and would allow the user to automatically schedule the delivery of content.
Microsoft argued that Blackbird development would be cross-platform, since OLE support had already existed on Macintosh and there was work in progress on porting it to Unix systems.