WinFX has been officially retired as the name of what you get when you take the .NET Framework 2.0 and add WPF (Avalon), WCF (Indigo), and WF (WWF (in-application BizTalk for clients)). It'll now be called .NET Framework 3.0, which is pretty easy to comprehend. I must admit that I'm a little surprised by the move. After hearing for years about how the .NET brand was going away, it's pretty clear at this point that it's definitely not.

.NET began life as an ingredient brand that was designed to own the Web services space. Just like Microsoft used 2000 for a generation of products to signal to customers that those products were Y2K-ready, .NET was supposed to tell businesses that the branded product was Web services-ready.

The .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET launched in 2002 and absolutely rocked the Web services space. They also did a great job across the board for other types of development, but since the marketing was so Web services-focused (the right thing to do at the time), some customers raised concerns about the products being for Web services, only. Of course that wasn't the case, but there was enough customer confusion that it sort of soured the brand for other product teams. If you can remember way back then, there was supposed to be Windows .NET Server, Office .NET, etc. With the exception of Passport (which has since been unbranded and seems to be heading towards the new Live brand), everyone else bailed on .NET and it became almost exclusively a developer brand.

Over the years, the .NET Framework has continued to accrue great brand value. However, when .NET was dropped from the Visual Studio naming in 2005, it seemed to be in-line with the strategy to retire .NET. It seemed clear that the final .NET product, the .NET Framework, was to evolve into WinFX, but this delivered new customer concerns regarding the future of .NET Framework applications, which many companies had made huge bets on. There's been kind of a hybrid story explaining how the .NET Framework would be around for "reach" scenarios (but not as "reachy" as Web apps) and WinFX would be the ultimate "rich" platform. Unfortunately, more choices actually produces less clarity and can be detrimental to the success of the platforms. The retirement of WinFX clearly signals that the .NET Framework is the way to go for apps today and tomorrow, and that's a great thing for the long haul.

6/9/2006 7:56:54 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]