One of the problems with the rebranding of everything '.NET' is that '.NET' is actually a pretty piss-poor brand. .NET was launced at around the time when Sun Microsystems were busy trying to get everyone to forget that they'd every claimed to be the 'dot in .com', and '.NET' just came across as a bit of me-too marketing (of what was actually a rather cool set of ideas) under a rather crappy umbrella title - one which employed a punctuation mark as it's first character.

The fact that everyone involved in cmmentating on it, at the time, received a ten page document from Microsoft marketing, outlining exactly when (and under what circustances) there should be a space in front of the dot in '.NET' (when it's a 'product' as opposed to a 'technology', if I recall correctly, whatever that means) also detered people from taking it all too seriously, too. When it's more important to know how to write something's name, than to know what to do with it, most technologists tend to be wary of it.

Some of this wariness was justified, too. Many mediocre managers, from failing departments in Redmond, jockeyed to get their marginal (and often failing,) products rebranded as a '.NET'product - dluting what could have been a strong set of offerings with 'lots of "Wireless Server .NET" duds. This has been the continuing trend with all of Microsoft's 'Live' branding efforts. Live has been regarded as a rather-less-sinking ship, in a whole floatilla of leaky tubs, around the edges of Microsoft's core businss... and every rat with a half-baked product, who is seeking to justify his or her budget for the next six months has tended to leap aboard it.

What they should really do, is announce some dorky new product range, let the fail-specialists jump aboard, and then cut the boat loose and watch it sink, taking a good quarter of the deadwood in the company, with it. That'll never happen, however, because fartoo many of those specialists are among the Senior Partners, who are lining hemselves up for this years Executive Officer Incentives Plan bonanza.

EOIP is the technology - damn - I mean product - No, I mean... 'pig trough' formerly branded as 'SPSA' (it's a new, improved SPSA, that is precompiled in advance, so that the rest of the employees cannot look at the details and work out how it works, however).