Doug Ross @ Journal

Ballmer: .NET is stalled

Picture credit: http://www.techriots.com
I'm not sure exactly to what Microsoft's President is referring when he posits that .NET has been "stalled" for the last year. In corporate America, .NET seems to be making positive headway against J2EE-based solutions. It does seem, however, that in the SME and Internet hosting world, open-source and mixed-source solutions (e.g., Zend's PHP-based offerings) are dominating. And there's no reason that Microsoft, like Oracle and IBM before it, can't coexist with the increasingly popular LAMP stack.

Think .NET web services with multi-platform front-ends, for instance. Some advantages come to mind: non-homogenous infrastructure, which has certain cost and security advantages; ability to leverage pieces of the LAMP stack; less vendor tie-in; reduced licensing costs; and so forth.

Asked about the future of its .NET strategy, Ballmer admitted the platform "had stalled in the last 12 months". But there would be a renewed .NET push, he said, and this was "an assigned priority" for the government sector. "Government has really been pushing for stronger interoperability. We can't support open source but we can support interoperability," he said.

News.com: Ballmer: We'll kick-start "stalled" .NET