The age of technologies being built using .Net is fast coming to an end. People are shifting away from Microsoft and towards more Google, Oracle, Apple, and Open Source technologies. People are getting tired of the drudge effect that comes with Microsoft and "this only works on windows" type of conundrums. As Microsoft tries to re-brand itself one cannot help but wonder that out of the trenches Google has mustered enough competitive advantage in the web space that even Microsoft is struggling to compete. Take for example, their new logo with the primary colors, it is as if they are trying to marry themselves as a new Google enterprise and yet at same time letting every one know that Microsoft is now substandard. Microsoft has always struggled with developing web applications. They developed .Net to compete against Java. And, yet Open Source for so many is the new trend and answer to so many questions. Even though, Mono seems to hold a lot more promise than .Net for the future. There are other new technologies now in market that polyglot programming is becoming the new norm and the fact that virtual machines need to support not just one language but many. Individuals, start-ups and corporations alike do not want to be stuck in a rut and want languages, tools, and platforms that are vendor neutral, provide for open choice of compatibilities, and future for growth and change. Microsoft technologies unfortunately are designed for profit margins and not so much for business and application transformations. It seems only likely that Microsoft will trend towards buying more technology companies to compete against Google and yet still struggle to produce products and services that can meet the changing demands of the marketplace. As yet, the Windows platform is slowly receding in popularity from generational releases while such platforms as the Apple OS, Linux, and Android are gaining far greater momentum. Windows is slowly moving towards extinction and the .Net a past over hyped platform. Even in an era of cloud computing the web services is not the domain of Microsoft technologies that have always worked with the analogy of a singularity of a desktop. Now the landscape is changing and desktops, mobile, handhelds, laptops are all becoming the vision of Sun Microsystems who once envisioned the network is the computer. Everything is connected through a global network. In a new wave where licenses and security become even more tricky to implement, monitor, and control. Microsoft now faces new challenges and frontiers in an area for which they were never very good at providing solutions. As individual and business needs grow and change so do the technologies that are required to provide the solutions to such changes. People these days have complex tastes and this is bound to get even more complex as life takes on new advances from cloud computing to the true ubiquitous spectrum of computing. In all fairness, can Microsoft really hold its ground in such a sheer volume of challenges far away from the isolated walls of a desktop? What one can do on .Net, one can do better on Java and the multitude of domain languages that can be constrained within a singular JVM.
