“Microsoft Corp.’s initial presentation of its .Net vision last
week raised many questions – such as how the new online software
services plan will affect the future of Windows 2000 and
Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and how the Internet
services will be licensed. Some users are hoping to get answers at
Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), which starts
July 11 in Orlando.”
“Industry analysts this week said Microsoft must prove that
developing applications using .Net will be faster and easier than
other approaches such as Enterprise JavaBeans. … Also at issue is
the fact that Microsoft has given no indication of how it will
price its hosted building-block services. … Others worry about
the security implications of depending on Microsoft-hosted
services. … Another uncertainty is the fate of Microsoft
technologies such as DCOM, which some say is largely superceded by
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), the Microsoft-driven proposed
standard for program-to-program communication that is to be the
“glue” between various .Net services.”
“Because of the many blanks in the .Net plan, “it will be
four years before an enterprise would look at this as a viable
platform for its enterprise computing needs,” predicted William
Hurley, an analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston.”