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Sept. 4, 2000

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Microsoft's .Net Is A Many-Layered Promise

Stuart J. Johnston wonders if Microsoft's .Net strategy will confuse those who can't tell a framework from system software.

By Stuart J. Johnston

In the two months since Microsoft revealed its .Net initiative, I've asked a lot of people--industry players, third-party vendors, Microsoft officials and partners, as well as analysts and users--what it all means. Several individuals voiced the opinion that company executives weren't kidding when they said that applications and systems groups are working so closely that a breakup of the company would endanger future Microsoft products.

Most important are the technologies at the lowest level of .Net. Built as an evolution of the Windows Component Object Model (COM), Microsoft's .Net Framework consists of a universal application-execution engine and a set of common class libraries that all applications can use. Basically, this is a layer on top of the operating system that allows the coming .Net applications to run.

Microsoft touts the .Net Framework as enabling greater programmer productivity because it will require much less code to be written from scratch and much more code to be reused--the holy grail of object-oriented programming. The framework, when coupled with the forthcoming Visual Studio.Net programming suite, due out next year, aims to provide a Lego-like building block capability to let programmers quickly create Web services. Snap them together, link in a vast array of other software and services available over the Internet, and click to deploy.

That's the promise. We'll have to wait a few years to see if it can live up to the vision.

But how will the .Net Framework portion be delivered? In Visual Studio? Nope. With the applications? Maybe initially. But, ultimately, the .Net Framework will be delivered with the operating system. Microsoft has not gone out of its way to advertise this, maybe because .Net is still so new that it hasn't occurred to company officials to say so in capital letters, or perhaps they didn't want to start another round of attacks from the Justice Department.

I can hear the antitrust enforcers now: "There they go again, bundling applications technologies directly into the operating system to defeat competitors." But it's not that simple. Microsoft has said it will make public all the relevant interfaces for the .Net Framework so others can implement it on Linux or other platforms if they wish.

For instance, Microsoft already has Windows source code sharing relationships with Windows-to-Unix/Linux porting tool vendors Mainsoft and Bristol Technologies. So it doesn't seem so farfetched that the .Net Framework might appear on Linux. What then? For one thing, you'd be able to run Office.Net, Microsoft's proposed .Net-enabled version of the Office applications, on another platform without having to port the millions of lines of Office code over.

In August, after reports surfaced that Mainsoft was porting Office to Linux, Microsoft publicly denied such an effort exists. But if the .Net Framework is being ported to Linux, that would accomplish the same thing. In fact, Microsoft execs encouraged third parties to create .Net implementations on other platforms during their .Net Framework announcement. Porting the .Net Framework to Linux would also mean that any other programs written for the .Net Framework on Windows would also run on .Net on Linux.

Of course, Microsoft execs have said that they intend to make Windows the most appealing platform for hosting .Net services. But if Linux's open-source community can provide all the necessary underpinnings required for scalability, load balancing among servers, directory, etc., that Windows 2000 provides, there's no major reason the Linux army couldn't take on Microsoft's latest game on its own terms and win. After all, back in college, my favorite economics professor loved to cite co-opting the competition as a key characteristic of capitalism.

Meanwhile, since the .Net Framework is an evolution of Microsoft's COM+ middleware layer, you should look for more and more operating systems functions to be built on top of .Net and not on the underlying operating system itself, according to several analysts. The eventual outcome could be that the operating system itself becomes irrelevant.

So is the .Net Framework an application technology or an operating system technology? And in a breakup of Microsoft into separate applications and systems companies, which Baby Bill would the .Net Framework go with? Says Will Zachmann, VP at the consulting firm Meta Group and a former Microsoft basher who likes the .Net idea: "I pity the poor federal judge who would have to come up with a way to extract this. It's one illustration of why antitrust laws written for oil wells and railroads don't work with high tech. .Net isn't a product; it's a strategy."

Stuart J. Johnston has covered Microsoft for more than 12 years. He can be reached at stuartj@halcyon.com.


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