wI-OSMAN- Posted July 25, 2002 Share Posted July 25, 2002 July 25, 2002 | Paul Thurrott Gates Evaluates .NET, Promises Future Advances What if you bet the company on a new technology that no one understands let alone uses? That's the problem facing Microsoft two years after it announced its .NET strategy, with many of its customers still asking the company today, "What is .NET?" So Microsoft brought out the executive big guns, assembled one hundred mainstream reporters and financial analysts in Redmond this week, and went to work trying to explain what the company was doing with its Web services vision. The result, in effect, was a .NET report card, along with a peek at what's coming in the future. "Phase 1 is essentially behind us, with things that went well and not so well," Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said. "This is a long-term approach. These things don't happen overnight." That's for sure. After two years, Microsoft has effectively made zero progress on .NET: It's only two mainstream .NET products, .NET Passport and Hotmail, actually pre-date .NET. Other .NET technologies, such as the so-called .NET Enterprise Servers, have little to do with .NET, regardless of their names. Gates assigned the company a "C" report card grade for its delivery of software services thus far. But that grade might be a bit generous. For the future, Microsoft sketched out a wide array of products and technologies that will be built on .NET. A project code-named Greenwich provides the real-time communications muscle needed on the server to deliver a seamless experience for desktop and Pocket PC users, for example; Greenwich is due in mid-2003. Microsoft's oft-touted Yukon release of SQL Server, now due late next year but in development for eons, will form the basis of the next Windows file system, a future Exchange data store, and the next major revision of Active Directory, the company says. The company's most compelling upcoming release, Longhorn, the next major revision of Windows, is still at least two years away, Gates said. This extended schedule might necessitate further interim releases of Windows before then, such as the new XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) release that's being fielded next month. But the company didn't do a lot of talking about Longhorn yesterday, focusing instead on the more immediate challenges it faces with .NET. Given the company's debatable accomplishments thus far, it still has a lot of work to do. Link: http://www.wininformant.com/Articles/Index...ArticleID=26033 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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