Microsoft has been heavily touting their new technology they are calling ".Net” (pronounced “Dot Net”). Many people have asked me what this is and how it will affect them as a small business online. To be blunt, it won’t affect you in the near future. Like any new technology, it will take a little time to catch on. Note, however, that it may catch on faster than it would otherwise because it has the Microsoft media machine backing it.

Logging on to the .Net Home site, you’ll find a lot of propaganda about this technology. Much of the information contained there is meant for programmers, developers, and other technical people. I’ll try to translate some of that jargon into layman’s terms and explain what this technology is in a nutshell.

Can't We All Just Get Along

.Net is not a single program or programming language. It is really a set of protocols for connecting information between people, systems, and devices. Compare it to the written language. This article is written in American English, which allows anyone who can read English to read it. The language is a go-between that transfers my thoughts to yours. Much like this, .Net will be a go-between for information being transported between one piece of software and another.

For an individual or business, this may have great implications in the future. Currently, for one piece of software to interact with another, both makers of each piece of software have to agree on a medium or information type. We have few standards in place for this type of interactivity. A good example of this sort of thing in practice, from current technology, is the web browser. Whether you use Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, or any other browser, web pages all basically look the same. This is because pages are built using a standard called HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

Another standard for information exchange appeared in the mid-nineties and began realizing its potential quickly. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is the building block for Microsoft’s .Net technology.

Let’s use a business example of how .Net may change the way you do business online. Let’s say you have a website with a shopping cart, credit card gateway, and a merchant account. Now lets assume that your credit card gateway has become too big for their britches and has raised their transfer rates to process credit cards for you. You’re ready to switch, but this could be a costly proposition: requiring you to change shopping cart software, re-input your inventory, or even rebuild your entire website.

Now put .Net in the picture. If the technology works as promised and your website was using it, the changeover would be easy. All you would have to do is find the gateway you want to use, make sure they are “.Net Ready” and make a few administrative changes to your current shopping cart. This could mean the difference between spending a hundred and spending a thousand dollars for a fix.

Although this example doesn’t cover all of the intricacies involved in this type of transaction, it should give you an inkling of what .Net could do if it is implemented correctly. A more expanded example is given on the Microsoft .Net website. This example cites the use of a handheld device, a PC, and a web server all working in concert to distribute information between employees, managers, and others.

Past Promises Broken