Microsoft’s .Net initiative is a CPU, transport and OS independent framework designed to be language agnostic. the original R&D vision for MS .Net was as platform. this was near heresy for many leading the Windows franchise–though i doubt the drama ever neared the fevered pitch of the raging battles between Allchin and Silverberg in the “Internet Platform” vs. Windows days.
i sat in a closed doors briefing in Redmond many years back where i was given the framework code and told that .Net was already available in-house on flavors of Unix and NT. after my trip i wrote an internal white paper in which i described how .Net could fail. the key failure point, as i remember it now, was for MS to monetize .Net to death. that is, that they would endeavor to so tightly couple .Net the architecture with MS products that it would lose all credibility and value.
.Net may yet remain the meta-operating system that it was designed to be.</em>