Comment Articles

Why Apple should support Microsoft's .Net

Stephan Somogyi AnchorDesk

Published: 12 Feb 2002 17:14 GMT

When Sun first announced Java in the mid-1990s, it promised software could be developed once and then executed on any underlying hardware and operating-system combination for which a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) had been developed. Since then, the grand "write once, run anywhere" promise hasn't really been delivered, but Java has become successful in niches that Sun didn't originally envision, for example, building server-based Web applications.

Microsoft's .Net distinctly reminds me of Java in its early days, since there's a lot of buzz surrounding it, but it's unclear how it will evolve once it's out in the real world. What's more, .Net appears to be a far-reaching endeavour; the likelihood of some of its pieces failing and others succeeding is quite high.

Microsoft's main competitor in the PC OS business is without question Apple. And while Microsoft has been exhorting its Windows developers to transition to .Net as quickly as possible, Apple's in the thick of its own transition from the Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X. However, Mac OS X doesn't address the same types of developer issues that .Net appears to.

If Apple remains too focused on Mac OS X as an end rather than a means, and if .Net gets as much traction as it's likely to (given that Microsoft is throwing all of its considerable oomph behind it), Apple may discover a hole in its developer strategy.

Consequently, my ears pricked up last week when I read that the Mono Project was "exploring" bringing the fruits of its labours to Mac OS X. Mono is a software effort underway at open-source developer Ximian that aims to produce a portable, open-source incarnation of various critical .Net building blocks. Mono's basic idea is to provide this .Net-compatible plumbing for Linux, allowing .Net applications to run on non-Microsoft, open source OSes. Since Mac OS X is based on BSD Unix, there's no good reason why Mono's efforts couldn't benefit OS X as well.