I think at one point .Net was going to be the next major brand for all MS products. At one point MSN Messenger was called ".Net Messenger" before it was renamed to Windows Live.
I imagine the branding didn't work for consumer products because nobody had any idea what it meant. Hell , I had no idea what it meant. I remember trying to figure out what .Net was because I had heard so much about it , but all I could get from MS' website was jargon and buzzwords about "enterprise web services".
It wasn't until I started writing C# code that integrated so seemlessly with old VB code and started being able to do things easily (like sockets , databases and GUIs) that I would previously have had to dig through obscure C++ APIs for that I "got it".
I imagine the branding didn't work for consumer products because nobody had any idea what it meant. Hell , I had no idea what it meant. I remember trying to figure out what .Net was because I had heard so much about it , but all I could get from MS' website was jargon and buzzwords about "enterprise web services".
It wasn't until I started writing C# code that integrated so seemlessly with old VB code and started being able to do things easily (like sockets , databases and GUIs) that I would previously have had to dig through obscure C++ APIs for that I "got it".