Microsoft and the enterprise market, is it reality?
Since Microsoft published .Net they start to push .Net as solution for enterprise market. .Net introduces much more mature developing system combining with much more mature servers and operating system. Microsoft adopts several programming concept such as OO, ORM, Attributes. Microsoft also Improve IIS and operating systems and they are keeping improving their operating systems and development tools by developing Longhorn and Whidbey. But it looks to me that all that effort not really addresses the enterprise needs. Before I mention the word Java I just want to mention that I'm not java guy at all. My daily occupation as enterprise guy simply forces me to interact with Java and Java solution on a daily basis. My interaction with Java not as a language or development tool but as a set of infrastructures and frameworks for enterprise development make my daily life as Microsoft guy very but very hard. As opposed to the rich opportunities that Java solutions supplies to enterprises I just have IIS, BizTalk, COM+ and other servers that I cant even compare to other solutions such as application servers (JBOSS), clustering, in memory databases (Giga spaces) and other useful open source project that already port to .NET such as Nunit, Nant and as I heard recently Nspring.
The main reason for the .Net gap is that Java has been in the enterprise field for a long time and that time needed to learn from real life experience what frameworks, infrastructures and other project are really need for enterprise development. It looks to me that Microsoft isn’t aiming to target the enterprise market specifically. They are target a wider range of markets and pay the taxes in the enterprise field. I really don’t know and until now don’t find why. The only consumption that I have is that none of the leading PM or product manager come with strong background of enterprise developing. But it's just my assumption and I really don’t know all the right people in Microsoft to come to such conclusion.
What I know for sure that most of the enterprise solution that the java community has to offer are open source projects developed by programmers who see the need and develop solutions. I just think that those solutions can be adopted for .NET usage after adaptation to .NET that should take advantage of .NET abilities. If the current java solution will be converting to .NET they could help .NET to penetrate more easily into the enterprise market. I talk with some MS workers about that subject but they don’t appear to my enthusiastic to import those java projects into .NET world. Apparently that work is left to us, the .Net community …