Why was .NET called .NET?

Question

I always wondered why Microsoft chose such a strange, search-engine-unfriendly name for such a great platform. Couldn't they have come up with something better?

Apparently the codename was NGWS:

Microsoft started development on the .NET Framework in the late 1990s originally under the name of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS). ^[Wikipedia]

Does anyone know why they chose the name .NET?

Answer 1

.NET enabled Microsoft's marketing people to emphasise the "Network"-ing aspect of its technologies, and was also a reaction to the marketing blitz by Sun Microsystems in the late 1990s whose theme was "The network is the computer". The term "Dot-Com" was synonymous with the Internet that time, and "Dot-NET" was a play on that term.

I don't think it is a bad name at all, the problem was that Microsoft named so many products with the ".Net" nomenclature like .NET My Services and Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers where the latter had nothing to do with the Internet. It caused so much confusion. Only later did Microsoft correct things by limiting the .NET name to technologies related to the Managed Runtime Framework.

Answer 2

interNET would be my guess

In the mid\late 90's Microsoft saw the internet as the Future and also felt they where a little late to the game. Thus Explorer being forced on people by being embedded in the OS(Which they are regretting now). Removing competitors such as Java from Windows AND a really over the top name like .NET to indicate there are now a web friendly company....

Answer 3

I was a dev at Microsoft at the time, and I have no idea whose ass the name .NET was pulled from. Anyone I talked to thought it was a lousy name for all the reasons already enumerated. At least it's pronounceable, unlike NGWS.

Answer 4

The early marketing thrust of .NET was web services. .NET was supposed to make it easy both to write and consume web services. In particular, it was supposed to make it easier to call the web services that Microsoft was going to provide, and that everyone would then use: the ".NET My Services".

Of course, that fell apart very quickly, but the name remained. It was at least better than "COM++" or "ActiveXX".