Microsoft's new baby promises plenty

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

SYDNEY - While Microsoft's .net strategy may not be fully realised for several years, it is already clear that short of renaming the company, the software giant could not place more emphasis on its vision of the next generation internet.

The subject dominated a briefing given by chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates to 120 journalists and analysts in Sydney yesterday, where the Microsoft .net logo was given equal prominence to the company's main trademark.

Mr Gates is in Australia mixing business with pleasure, this week attending the World Economic Forum in Melbourne, but returning to Sydney to take his family to the Olympic Games.

"I'll be taking some personal vacation next week. I'm looking forward to it," he said.

Today his schedule will include a brief one-on-one meeting with Information Technology Minister Paul Swain as well as a briefing with the chief information officers of 15 New Zealand organisations. Going by his performance at yesterday's media conference, where Mr Gates displayed adroitness in turning almost every question back to the topic of .net, the platform is likely to feature strongly in both discussions.

In a nutshell, Mr Gates says that .net will do for the internet what MS-DOS and Windows did for personal computing.

"It's the idea that all of your information should be free from any individual device. In the same way that Microsoft came along and said that the PC hardware of your choice should be independent of what software you buy, now we are going much further than that.

Now we are saying to people no matter what cell phone you get or what PDA [personal digital assistant], or what PC you get, you should be able connect up to the internet and all the information that you care about should be there."

In Mr Gates' view, .net will be the plumbing that enables users to stay in control in the digital world.

"The system should understand on your behalf all of your communications preferences - you know who should be able to ring your phone at various times of day, who should be able to put something in your inbox."

Microsoft is also promising that .net will easily and automatically combine information garnered from several different sources in a manner that can now be achieved by advanced users with much manual intervention.

While Mr Gates has no concerns over demand for the facilities promised by .net he admits that it will be some time before they become a reality at the end user level.

".net is not an overnight thing. This phase of the internet will be about a five- or six-year phase."

The next .net milestone will be the appearance of development tools, the first of which, Visual Studio .net, is being shown in nascent form to a privileged few in the software industry. "It's not even in beta stage but it will appear some time next year," said Mr Gates.

Microsoft's next major operating system release, codenamed Whistler, which is also due for launch next year, will also contain some .net related features. But Mr Gates said he expected that .net would one day be quietly accepted just as the graphical user interface (GUI) in Windows was.

The .net vision is one that Microsoft, which celebrated its 25th anniversary last week, is uniquely positioned to deliver.

While other companies, such as Novell with its One Net strategy and Sun with the Java language, seem to be promising parts of a similar platform, no other company enjoys Microsoft's strengths across development tools, operating systems and application software.

But overshadowing all of this is the spectre of the United States Department of Justice, and the ruling that Microsoft should be split into two.

Last month a highly placed Microsoft executive refused to answer whether the .net project would survive such a split as it was "not a scenario that we have considered." Even if the company manages to remain as one, if .net succeeds it would put Microsoft at the very hub of tomorrow's global network, and it remains to be seen whether any one company would be allowed to become that powerful.

* Michael Foreman visited Sydney as a guest of Microsoft.