Before I start; Here’s a famous quote of Mr. William Gates: “1994 – I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least ten years.” – Four years later the giant we know today as Google Inc. was founded. Two years after that Google were crowed the Worlds largest Search Engine.

The trend of Microsoft ignoring the importance of the Internet has been around for a lot longer than most people can remember. And for this exact reason my motivation for learning ASP.NET is minimal. Don’t get me wrong – I understand the importance of learning a Microsoft language. I understand that employers are looking for people who know the new .NET framework, I also know that Microsoft are, obviously, the dominant suppler of software in the market. However, I personally believe that for such a large company, their naivety is enough to put you off learning their web language.

I am also a strong believer of Open Source. When i started College at the age of 16 I made the decision to learn a programming language. I started off learning Visual Basic 6, but decided that the importance of the Internet was too much to miss on (even a 16 year old boy can see it), so I decided to learn PHP. PHP is an Open Source language developed to run on multi-platforms making it very versatile and develop-able. Because PHP is Open Source there is a large “fan base” and support community to go with it. Along with PHP I also enjoy playing with Linux, which is also open source. Which is another reason I want to stay away from ASP.NET, and ASP in general. I realise that Microsoft can only advertise their own products, it wouldn’t make sense if they allowed everyone and anyone to make their own languages. What they haven’t done is make ASP for an other Operating Systems such as Linux. This may be impossible to do, I don’t know, but it would be nice to see them attempt it.

To summarise. I don’t believe Microsoft are leaders in the Internet market and will never be. Their current roll of the most dominant company in the software and SDK / IDE market will, I feel, be stolen by someone like Google, or even perhaps Apple. Open Source / Linux is become more and more popular with the every day user. Take Dell for example, they give you the chance to buy personal computers and servers with Red Hat pre-installed. Dell have been associated with Microsoft for many years, and are probably Microsoft’s largest retailer, now they’re supplying an alternative.