Longtime Internet users know that ".net" is the top-level domain name (like ".com") originally intended for public network resources. It's true that the label has long since ceased to mean much beyond providing an alternative for folks who can't get the ".com" address they want. Still, it seemed to take considerable hubris for Microsoft -- a company presently in some trouble with the law -- to appropriate such a public-spirited label and privatize it as a new part of its brand identity.

But the .Net label (which has replaced the unwieldy "Next Generation Windows Services" moniker) seems more a mediocre marketing device than anything else. If you actually point your browser to www.microsoft.net you don't get Microsoft's barrage of information on the new .NET program, you just get a duplicate version of the www.microsoft.com homepage.

It's understandable that Microsoft would be struggling with how to market its latest technology mega-initiative: It's not easy to get your head around just what .Net is and what it means. When Microsoft launched Windows in the 1980s, it was easy to say, "It's a graphic interface -- kind of like the Macintosh." When Microsoft turned itself toward the Internet in 1995 with Internet Explorer, it was easy to say, "It's a Web browser -- kind of like Netscape." Unlike these previous ventures, .Net doesn't appear to be a me-too project; it's not kind of like anything. Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, it is a Microsoft baby, not an adopted child.

But, still, er, what is it? Microsoft's leaders themselves had trouble defining the ".Net vision" at the rollout event last week. There was a lot of talk about "the cloud" -- a network engineer's term meaning "the whole mess of stuff that's out there somewhere on the Net" -- and the cloudiness seemed to seep into the language every time someone tried to explain .Net to the crowd. Here, for instance, is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer attempting to clarify:

.Net represents a set, an environment, a programming infrastructure that supports the next generation of the Internet as a platform. It is an enabling environment for that ... .Net is also a user environment, a set of fundamental user services that live on the client, in the server, in the cloud, that are consistent with and build off that programming model. So, it's both a user experience and a set of developer experiences, that's the conceptual description of what is .Net.

So ... it's an environment and an infrastructure and a platform and a set of services and a whole bunch of different experiences. This is the classic language of vaporware: Software products that do not yet exist but that companies feel compelled to announce in an effort to cow competitors and wow investors.

Still, it's possible to read Microsoft's "White Paper" and plow through the executive presentations and garner some sense of where Microsoft wants us to think it's heading and where it hopes to take the rest of the industry. At heart, it's clear, .Net is the latest and probably most ambitious effort ever on the part of a major technology company to achieve the holy grail of universal integration and interoperability: If only all your hardware and software, all the information you receive and all the data you generate, could work together in harmony, what a wonderful world it would be!

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