There's an old story about what happens when several blind men encounter an elephant. One, feeling the leg, says that an elephant is like a tree. Others, touching various other parts of the elephant's anatomy, describe it as other things. The point of the story, besides not hiring blind men to do anatomical surveys, is that depending upon your perspective, a particular object can look different.

Nothing in my career in IT has had more similarity to this story than NET. Perhaps that's because, unlike the blind men, the parties involved have a vested interest in having their particular version of the truth prevail. Because, you see, .NET is a myth. No, .NET is a reality, and J2EE is legacy code. .NET is full of security holes. No, NET is robust and the platform itself will protect the developer and the user. .NET is a risk because it collects personal information.... All of these statements have been bandied about in the press.

This issue of WSJ focuses on the .NET platform. This technology, based on SOAP, UDDI, and the entire Windows platform, is the critical software suite on which Microsoft is staking its hopes of revolutionizing the industry.

Microsoft faces a number of challenges in driving toward that goal. The Windows server platform, particularly IIS, has been assailed by hackers who took advantage of its ease-of-use features and turned upon the very platform itself. These incidents have made it difficult for people to accept that the .NET platform can be secure, and because a Web services platform is intended to expose the key business functionality of an enterprise, this difficulty translates into hesitancy in adoption of .NET.

Nevertheless, Microsoft is making great efforts toward improving security and removing the issue as a stumbling block toward adoption. But a second concern, privacy, also looms large. That's because MS Passport, a part of .NET, collects a large amount of personal information, and, when used in conjunction with commerce sites, may evolve into one of the most comprehensive demographic databases available.

But this data collection isn't necessarily bad. If we can get past the superficial cross selling to a point where actual intelligence kicks in, it might be worth it. For example, I buy a lot of music online but my tastes are eclectic. One week I may buy a country album, the next some adult alternative music, the following week some light jazz, and the next something mainstream. A site that digests my tastes and can recommend new artists intelligently would get my vote immediately. And because I like new music, I'd be willing to allow the site to collect that kind of information. If Passport can fulfill this vision, I'm for it.

It really comes down to a vision. Microsoft has one vision of Web services based on the .NET model. While remaining Microsoft-centric and leveraging traditional MS tools, it achieves a lot of platform interoperability, which is a big plus in the corporate development world. And, while retaining the benefits and uniqueness of the Windows platform, .NET allows other platforms to integrate with Windows in ways that were not possible before.

Of course, this worries the others involved in Web services. In particular, the J2EE vision of Web services finds the platform irrelevant, and focuses more on the application server as the platform. Certainly, this leverages multiple-hardware architectures effectively. But it represents a divergence from the .NET strategy. And yet, because it encompasses XML, UDDI and sometimes SOAP, it provides a great deal of interoperability with the .NET platform, although the focus is on assimilation rather than true cooperation.

For these vendors, .NET is a worry. It's the strongly leverageable Windows desktop moving into the enterprise server environment where UNIX and the mainframe live, and where Java has most successfully penetrated. Certainly .NET threatens this position.

So it's not surprising that the press, in covering the various vendor positions on .NET, makes it look like the situation with the blind men. Each has some grain of truth, some viewpoint of .NET as it relates to Web services, and still it seems like the big picture somehow escapes us. Hopefully, this issue will help you make up your mind and determine which part of the elephant .NET is for you.