Four years ago, CIOs worried that .Net, which Microsoft was proclaiming a revolutionary new software architecture, was just another name for lock-in. "I'm not confident that Microsoft .Net will be compliant with open standards," Brett Kottman, then the e-commerce director for Excellence in Motivation, told CIO magazine in 2001.
He wasn't alone. In a CIO Research Report from that year, seven out of 10 CIOs said they wouldn't adopt .Net. Just one in four said Microsoft's motivation for launching .Net was technical; almost 60 percent said the motivation was marketing.
Fast-forward to earlier this year when FedEx executive VP and CIO Rob Carter built a Web service that allows his people to print to a nearby FedEx Kinko's from inside Windows Office applications. He used .Net to build it. But here's the surprising part: On the back end, the platform it connects to is not Windows and, says Carter, "It's really of no consequence that it's not."
