Day 2- Strategy: Blueprint shrouded in mystery
If the public has been unclear on the concept, that may be precisely what Microsoft had planned all along. Although it has a 25-year history of trumpeting grandiose initiatives, sometimes with dubious intentions and chameleon-like business plans, .Net may appear uniquely enigmatic. The company is targeting a new and rapidly evolving area--Web services. And, in light of the company's current legal problems, Microsoft's plans may appear so grand that a detailed announcement would be tantamount to a public dare to antitrust authorities.
With the release of Windows XP--the first major public step in its .Net initiative--the software leader is in the excruciatingly delicate position of pushing to market a crucial product featuring an integration plan that is being challenged as anti-competitive in the company's landmark federal case. Some say the sheer scope of the .Net campaign will dwarf the concerns of previous legal challenges involving browsers and operating systems.
Microsoft.Net is a mammoth effort that begins with Windows XP and branches out to nearly all of Microsoft's products, services, Web sites and development efforts. It is an umbrella concept for how new software should be designed; a set of products for building that software; and an initial set of hosted services, called .Net My Services. Through that controversial strategy, Microsoft plans to offer a broad array of services, including online calendaring, contact-list management, document and image storage, credit card information, and personal identification data--all accessible from any conceivable digital device, anywhere on the planet.
"This whole thing is driven by the fact that Microsoft has hundreds of millions of Windows users out there, but Microsoft doesn't have a direct monthly billing relationship with those users," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. "That's their consumer strategy, in a nutshell."
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