.Net: 3 years of the 'Vision' Thing

3 years is too short a time for something as big as .Net to catch on. .Net is a long term strategy. A strategy that will make the operating system irrelevant. Or so I think.

And Microsoft can afford to take its time. The only raw material that goes into making software is the time and manpower. Nothing else. But for Microsoft Office and Windows are products that bring in residual income. They are still reaping in money from thier older products, and will continue to do so for a while. That is why they can afford to spend time on technologies like .Net, and Office 11's InfoPath. Its not like they are a normal company that have to continue to make products to earn money. Though I think they made a mistake of not starting out with these technologies sooner. For a while when they had no competition they just sat on thier butts and did barely anything.

Now that they have Linux, OpenOffice.org, Apple, and a whole bunch of other companies as competitors, they are suddenly realizing that they have to come up with products that will fight these competitive products. Hence, Longhorn with the new file system. A stable Windows (XP). Tablet PC. Office 11. XML documents. Emphasis on security.

One thing I dont understand. .Net was supposed to compete with Java. Well, Sun provides users with the JRE, java runtime environment, which is a simple download and install. On the other hand, I havent found a way that I could download a runtime environment for .Net so that I could run .Net apps. Why is that? Why is the runtime environment only bundled with the whole SDK (software development kit). I have a laptop. 2 gig hard drive. Only want to use it for one task. That task requires a .Net app. What do I do? Do I have to download the whole SDK? Something worth doing research about. As things stand, it seems that .Net was only meant to be running on enterprise network servers. Thats not such a good idea, because it seems to me like .Net is a lot more than that.