Microsoft can be a patient company. It took more than seven years for people to take its Windows desktop operating system seriously from the launch of version 1.0 to the release of version 3.0.

And last Thursday, the Redmond giant previewed its planned transition from a Windows-centric world to what it used to describe as Next Generation Windows Services and now calls .Net - a platform that will both provide subscription-based software services to users over the internet and deliver a programming infrastructure to developers.

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