Tuesday, January 14, 2003
The company has altered the branding of the confusing strategy.
SEATTLE (AP) -- For a time, just about everything at Microsoft Corp. was .NET-this and .NET-that. Now, the company is quietly retreating from a marketing strategy that some analysts say was a bad idea from the start.
Part of the problem, they say, is that while Microsoft was adding the .NET (pronounced "dot-net") tag to its software products, many people were unable to figure out just what it was.
The Redmond, Wash.-based software company is taking the .NET tag off Windows Server 2003, a key product to be released this spring. It also is evaluating the ubiquitous name's use on other software.
Instead, Microsoft is reworking its marketing and will promote the .NET brand -- Microsoft's fancy word for software plumbing -- by attaching a logo.
Vague strategy
The move is to help Microsoft articulate what many criticize as its arcane and vague strategy in the emerging field of "Web services."
"We wanted to make sure we're clear and crisp in our naming and as consistent as we can be," said Neil Charney, director of Microsoft's platform strategy group for .NET.
.NET is Microsoft's name for the technological framework it's building into its software that will support "Web services." As envisioned by companies such as Microsoft and IBM, Web services will allow computers to communicate, regardless of network, system, device, language or application.
This interoperability means, for instance, that a supplier would automatically know when to send inventory to a manufacturer because their respective systems interact without humans.
Just five months after Microsoft announced its next computer server operating system would be called Windows .NET Server 2003, it is pulling the .NET tag from the update for the powerful software that drives Internet computers.
The technology in the product -- one of the biggest expected from Microsoft this year -- and its expected April release are unchanged, Charney said.
By marking software with a ".NET connected" logo as opposed to putting it in the name, Microsoft can extend the use of the .NET tag to independent software vendors who write software based on the technology, Charney said.