About 10 years ago, I was part of a large team in Redmond, working on a set of projects that became .net. This was at a time when decisions were being made on how to name this work. I can tell you first hand that .net is not an acronym.
Instead, James Kovac’s blog post , which Jim W posted , is accurate: there was a long list of names that the team struck and rejected before finally settling on ".net". The final name was chosen because it:
- reflected the domain suffix (at that time) of each Internet service provider, so he intended to remind users that "web support for your software" was the main scenario that this work was aimed at.
- was more accessible to business types and CIOs than geekier names such as "Universal Runtime" or "COM + 2.0"
- It had such practical advantages as: being short, easy to write, globalized, could use existing domain names for each Microsoft product, etc.
- really went through a legal / trademark review (surprisingly difficult!)
Thus, it was intended to mean something, but moreover, a connotation, not just an abbreviation or description of something. In other words, the name was only partly marketing nonsense !; -)
More little things
I do not remember the exact positioning (it was 10 years!), But I believe that the name ".net" was supposed to cover three main things:
- The ".NET Framework" is a new framework for writing web-based applications.
- ".NET web services" - a way to access Microsoft software (and others) over the Internet programmatically using open standards and protocols (does anyone remember "Hailstorm"?)
- ".NET enterprise servers" - a set of products that facilitate the creation of web-based applications.
In practice, only the first value is stuck with users. Others have turned into other names (for example, "Windows Server System") or have been generalized by the public (for example, "web services", SOA, etc.). Anyway, why you no longer see Microsoft products under the name "<product name here> .NET Server" - Microsoft wisely decided to limit the name ".net" to what developers actually consider ".net"!
By the way, in addition to being short and easy to write and say, “.net” as a name also helped the web services strategy that Microsoft was considering at that time, which revolved around (and still is) offering software. which was also available in the cloud. The idea was that we would have, for example, Office.com for hosting the user interface and Office.net for the API. The name was also convenient because Microsoft already owned the .net domain name variants for each Microsoft product.
There is a funny T-shirt (I think they made Don-box?), Which lists all the names considered (for example, URT, COM +, etc.) with thick red lines drawn by all names except the last ( ". network" ). The list goes from the top of the shirt straight down, like a long list of canceled Mötley Crüe tour dates, but uneven!