Gates Tries to Explain .Net

AdamBa writes "Speaking to financial analysts and reporters, Bill Gates admitted that .NET hadn't caught on as quickly as he had hoped. The headline ('Gates admits .NET a "misstep"') is a bit misleading; he doesn't think all of .NET was a misstep, just the My Services part (aka Hailstorm). He also said that labelling the current generation of enterprise products as .NET might have been 'premature.' Summary: Microsoft got too excited about locking in users via Hailstorm and botched the overall .NET message." There's also a Reuters report and a NYTimes story on the same subject, which includes the interesting line: "Microsoft also warned today that the era of "open computing," the free exchange of digital information that has defined the personal computer industry, is ending." It isn't clear if Microsoft is talking about something happening beyond their control, or if they're boasting about ending it.

Comments

Gates give company a "C"

[pgpckt]

According to the CNN article, Gates has gone with a report card scheme to give his company a "C" rating (for non-americans, grades can be A,B,C,D, or F (no E), and C is "average").

I guess it is nice to see a top Microsoft exec give a realistic review of the company. I wonder if the corperate scandles of late have anything to do with this unusual honesty? Perhaps Gates feared if he gave too rosey a picture, stock holders would be skeptical.

I think if we were really honest with ourselves, we would rate Linux at around the same score (perhaps C+). It is good to see our main competitor admit that we are on a level playing field :)

The end of the Free exchange of info!

[LWATCDR]

I am only worried about the goverment making Palladium the LAW. We need to tell the our goverment that.
1. You can not take away our freedoms.
2. we do not gives a rats ass about the Record companies.
3. We do give a rats ass about us.
The software compaines do not want DRM. Get talking to your reps.

Re:Marketing to blame

[zero_offset]

I can't tell you how happy it makes me to see other people have figured this out. Microsoft marketing might be good at pushing individual products or tightly-coupled suites like Office, but when it comes to selling technologies, they suck badly. When I was beta testing and saw the "services" hype machine gearing up, I wanted to pull my hair out. It's as if a Ferrari salesman chooses to focus on the stereo exclusively. Yes, it's present and useful and some people will be very excited about it, but it ignores a vast array of other more important things, more compelling reasons to invest some effort into this.

During the beta I thought this might be just a smoke screen to keep the DOJ from looking at it too closely. After all, proper exploitation of the CLR should allow them to eventually run Windows on other hardware, or maybe even as a full replacement GUI/pseudo-OS layer on other OSes. However, this stupid murky message has persisted, so now I think it's just marketing incompetence.

Recall that MS marketing almost tanked the previous generation of MS technology with that stupid DNA bullshit. I remember YEARS went by before even many developers understood what DNA actually was -- a set of useful discrete but interoperable products which were related but were not "one big thing".

.NET itself is an excellent move for Microsoft, and since virtually everybody uses Microsoft products, it could eventually be a great thing for Windows users too (although if properly used/implemented, they probably won't know it's being used, which is fine).

I just hope BillG gets his heads out of the clouds long enough to pinpoint the problem, execute the market droids responsible for the mess, and make a cleaner, more digestible push to the people who really need to understand it -- the development community.

Oh yes, and one other point -- the size of the framework may prove to be a sticking point. It's pretty big, so unless you're selling CD-based traditional software, it'll be a hard sell for quite some time. But even the typical /. anti-MS flame-belching troll should at least recognize that MS is smart enough to have accomodated that in their planning.

How Gates planned to secure .NET

[Mr. Firewall]

One of the people at the White House Office of Cybersecurity told me an interesting story once.

About 2 years ago he was at a briefing of high mucky-mucks where Gates was pitching all of the Good Things (TM) that .NET was going to be.

My friend was in one of the front rows, not twenty feet from Gates. He knew that if he raised his hand, Gates couldn't ignore him. So he waited for a few reporters to ask their usual lame questions and then made his move: "Bill, how in the hell are you going to secure all of this?"

He says that Gates's eyes glassed over and his knuckles, where he'd been gripping the edges of the podium, turned white. He spent the next several minutes rambling about QOS -- yes, QOS was going to secure .NET!

There is more to this story that I wish I could tell. Suffice it to say that the White House cybersecurity people (including Howard Schmidt, who was recently vilified here) are not as stupid as slashdotters think they are. These men will never reveal in public their true opinion of Micro$oft, but they have spoken to me in private about it. They're not as far away from our opinions as you think.

How to end confusion over .NET

[wrinkledshirt]

At a local consumers conference, Microsoft's Bill Gates, apparently growing frustrated over the questions surrounding .NET ("What is it?" "What does it do?" "Why do I need it?") finally said, "Look! You know Java? Same $%#@ thing!" and then stormed out.

You know, to be honest, I think they kept it vague on purpose, so that they could sell a whole bunch of products and tout each one as an essential component of .NET. They were looking to brand first and foremost, and it's worked to a certain extent. I know some guys who landed some venture capital who say that they think .NET is great even though they can't quite explain what it is.

To be honest, I think if we weren't in the middle of the a Linux revolution right now, nobody would be asking the questions that needed to get asked about .NET and that Microsoft can't answer because they weren't expecting to have to answer them. Consider all those commercials touting One Degree of Separation. Yes, we all know that we could recreate the same systems in any OS/platform, only with .NET you can do it in VB.NET. Perhaps that's a bonus, but only the VB programmers are going to recognize that, and I wonder how many IT departments (the people who'd give the green light on the switch) would be dominated by VB programmers? Or there's the bonus of being able to write ASP+ pages in several different languages. How many different IT departments are dominated by the web programmers? Furthermore, even if the different programmers made a fuss over .NET, I wonder how many IT departments would have said "That's nice, but with a little effort and good design we can incorporate the benefits using our current tech."

Re:There's a large adoption issue surrounding .NET

[tshak]

Sorry if I sound like MS drone, but I have to contest your "+5 insightful" assertions.

a1. If you already have a substantial investment in software written in anything but a .NET language, chances are you aren't very motivated to switch paradigms.
This could be said with J2EE as well. We had a ton of Cold Fusion, PHP, and ASP/COM that we wanted to consolidate into one platform so we could reuse code accross applications. J2EE and .NET are the best candidates for this scenario.

I have yet to meet a serious java developer who has any interest in .NET


Again, this can be said for any set of competing languages. I could also say, "I have yet to meet a serious VB developer who does not have a huge interest in .NET".

Regardless of all the claims Microsoft makes about C#/.NET maturity, nobody in their right mind is going to bet the company on a new MS platform...

This is pure speculation. Sure, it sounds nice to say on /., but we're supposed to be scientists not religious zealots. Do the research (I'm not going to spoon feed it to you) and you'll find that you're wrong very quickly. One quick example, Verizon's entire customer service system (one of the biggest in the world) has been running .NET since it was in Beta. Ask anyone with solid .NET experience and they'll tell you that Beta 2 of .NET was more mature then Java was when it was released. It is much more mature then you think.

There is little imperative to adopt something for which there are no major none-Microsoft commercial offerings.


Unless you have no problems running on a Microsoft platoform, which many do not. Again, look at all of the ".asp" sites out there. The vast majority are NOT running on Chillisoft, and are probably looking to migrate to .NET within the next year or so (source: Gartner... grain of salt applied).

The wait-and-see approach is a tried and true paradigm with respect to version 1.0 software from Microsoft.


For larger and less technically ambitious companies I'd have to agree. However, for smaller companies who need to get away from ASP/COM, Cold Fusion, or even PHP, .NET is a viable solution, as is J2EE. I believe that they are both great competitors. Really, "Web Applications" are moving away from little scripting engines towards compiled, OO, strongly-typed languages. The only serious offerings are J2EE and .NET. I think the competition is great, and will only make our lives as developers better as both technologies get better.