Microsoft showcases .Net with business apps
- Article 53 of 77
- Information Age, October 2002
Microsoft is rolling out a new range of business applications designed to highlight the capabilities of its web services framework, .Net. Even if it fails to capture much of the business applications market, it hopes to create a far bigger knock-on effect in the potentially enormous web services market.
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Microsoft will also have trouble differentiating its portal product from other vendors'. It will use web services - which enable application and business process integration over networks and the Internet - as its main selling point. But with portal vendors already adding web services interfaces to their products, Microsoft will have little to boast except .Net integration when it releases it in Summer 2003.
Edwards says that the applications are designed to showcase .Net, rather than the other way round. “We realised it was all very well having a platform, but to drive adoption of that platform we need applications. Whereas office applications are the proof point of desktop and client server operating systems, we need business solutions to drive adoption of a business application platform,” he says.
It may not succeed in capturing a large market share for its new business applications - at least not immediately - but it only has to create a groundswell of deployments of its .Net-enabled servers in smaller companies and then dominance of the nascent, but potentially enormous, web services market will almost inevitably follow.
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