.Net In Phase Two

At a .Net briefing here last week, Gates said the IT investment of the dot-com era "probably won't be repeated for a long, long time to come." But he predicted that corporate investment in Microsoft's next generation of .Net products and services will rise as businesses look to shave costs.

More than two years after announcing .Net, Gates unveiled the platform's second phase, to be led by the launch of Windows.Net server in the first quarter of 2003. Microsoft executives also unveiled Windows.Net Release Candidate 1 at the briefing.

".Net is about breaking down barriers. Phase one is essentially behind us, with all of its lessons and things that went well and not so well," Gates said, adding that .Net MyServices is still being reworked and another developer release is due next year. "This is a long-term approach. All of these things don't happen overnight. But in the next two years, you'll really see a lot of these key things."

The first wave of .Net products included Visual Studio.Net and BizTalk, and the next wave will include Windows.Net server plus major upgrades of Sharepoint and Office in 2003, Microsoft executives said.

At the briefing, Microsoft also demonstrated a realtime communication/collaboration server, code-named Greenwich, and a notification server called SQL Server Notification Services for SQL Server 2000. Greenwich is slated to be released in the first half of 2003, and the notification server is due to ship this August. The company also highlighted future Everett and Yukon editions of VisualStudio.

"The key to the .Net platform is the partner support we get for it, the ISVs and consultants. There's always going to be a fight over the hearts and minds of those people. It's in our genes to use that model," Gates said. "Our biggest competition is IBM, but then they go and do their own implementation and favor their own internal consulting [staff rather than outside people."

Ballmer said the ability to wrap .Net plumbing around existing applications and infrastructure will make it an easier sell. "IT budgets are under pressure, and .Net has to fit into that context," he said. "So .Net is a way to reuse applications you already have. It reduces costs. It's an architectural approach to integration."