e2001 Your Digital Future - Bangkok Post Special Supplement

INTERNET

Microsoft hoping to woo with its new .Net strategy

Web applications are the next big thing

Tony Waltham

Microsoft is poised to go on an offensive to try to win over the software developer community to its .NET platform which it hopes will enable the next generation of web-based applications and which will bring a change to the Internet computing experience equal in significance to the transition from DOS to Windows-based computing.

Microsoft's weapon in this battle will be its Visual Basic 7 programming language which will also be known as Visual.NET when the beta version is released later this month. The company hopes that its .NET platform will provide seamless web services and distributed intelligence across both PCs and devices.

This would be the most important battle for the next generation of developers and it could go either way, Microsoft's Group Vice President for Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Services Orlando Ayala told me last month.

Noting that Java had not captured this ground, he conceded that this initiative was make or break. "In the next 24 months, I think the history of the next 25 years is going to be decided," he said.

The future would be about who would provide that programming paradigm in terms of a completely new generation of applications, he said. The impact on how people lived, interacted, globalised and learnt would be as significant as the introduction of the printing press, he believes.

Today, the web was very crude, with 90 percent of the work still to be done, he explained, adding that now we were at the verge of a new generation of programmers, and there was a vacuum.

Microsoft believes that VB7, or Visual .NET, would provide a product that would help people to "federate" their web sites, allowing them to expose their services to the users.

The beta is coming out at the end of November, with the full release scheduled for next July and Microsoft is expected to go on an offensive to win over the developer community, to convince them that this will be a superior tool for building this experience, he said.

Visual .NET would tie in with UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), and which was designed to extend XML and to make it easy for businesses to create partnerships and new business models using platform-neutral application components, he said.

Microsoft's .NET strategy differs from that of either Sun or Oracle in that it distributes intelligence over the network, which was a fundamentally different approach.

"We don't believe that that experience will be created in a central place," he said.

"It has got to be very dynamic and very contextual. Another very important part of Microsoft's .NET strategy would be around `mega-services'," he said, noting that there would be a war over who would create the dominant mega-services around identity, security, notification, messaging, storage and calendaring.

He said that everyone wanted to play a role in the creation of these mega-services and he didn't think that they will be all owned by one company, especially since they could be fairly easily built as plug-ins.

Mr Ayala predicted a lot of innovation in these mega-services with fierce competition that would keep everyone on their toes, especially Microsoft.