Comment Articles

.Net and the Emperor's new clothes

Charles Cooper CNet

Published: 06 Aug 2002 14:58 BST

When it comes to .Net, Microsoft always sounds cocksure about how this bet-the-company software initiative is going to rock the computing universe.

But each time Bill Gates gets going on the subject, he winds up stumping us with declarations like this: "We don't have the user-centricity until we understand context, which is way beyond presence -- presence is the most trivial notion of context."

Hegel on acid couldn't be more impenetrable.

Yes, it's long been Microsoft's habit to speak about .Net in tongues, just as Bill G did in the line above, which I lifted from the Microsoft chairman's recent talk with press and analysts at a .Net briefing day.

And the company continues to turn out torturous position papers with alacrity. That's bad news in bells since most of this grand software initiative still exists only as a PowerPoint demo on steroids.

But even Gates can't ignore the reality any longer.

After blowing smoke the last couple of years, Microsoft is finally acknowledging what the rest of us only said sotto voce: This project, as even Gates might allow, remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

"We still get people saying to us, 'What is .Net?'" he said. "It's one of those great questions that people can say, 'Yes, it's come into focus at the infrastructure level,' but a little bit where we go beyond that has been unclear to people."

That's the computer equivalent of the emperor stripping off his new clothes to reveal the Redmond family jewels.

Microsoft has long suffered a failure to communicate when it comes to .Net.