Register now or log in to join your professional community.
.NET was originally under the name of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS) when Microsoft started development of .NET Framework in the late1990s.
By late2000 the first beta versions of .NET1.0 were released. under the name .NET which enabled Microsoft's marketing people to emphasise the "Network"-ing aspect of its technologies that was a reaction to the marketing blitz by Sun Microsystems in the late1990s whose theme was "The network is the computer". So microsoft wanted to use a name that refares to NETworking and desided to use the same idia of .COM which was synonymous with the Internet that time.
the name .NET was chosen to enabled Microsoft's marketing people to emphasise the "Network"-ing aspect of its technologies, and was also a reaction to the marketing blitz by Sun Microsystems at the time, whose theme was "The network is the computer". The term "Dot Com" was synonymous with the Internet at the time, and "Dot Net" was a play on that term. I don't think it is a bad name at all, the problem was that Microsoft initially named so many products with the ".NET" nomenclature like ".NET My Services" and ".NET Enterprise Servers", where the latter had nothing to do with the Internet. It caused so much confusion. Only later did Microsoft correct itself by limiting the .NET name to technologies related to the managed software framework.
Bill said once "I didn't actually like the name .NET. It makes people wonder if we are finally just starting to learn about the Internet. Sadly, the other proposed name NGWS was even worse. Our mission statement at the time was 'work Anywhere, Anytime, on Any device,' so the proposal was AAAWare."
