Microsoft's .Net strategy is something akin to the old television game show "Concentration," which challenged viewers to decipher a phrase cleverly written in letters and hieroglyphics.

While Microsoft describes .Net as software that lives on the Internet instead of coming in shrink-wrapped packages, the year-old strategy still has IT executives scratching their heads as they try to figure out what the slew of .Net marketing lingo, standards and products will mean to their enterprise networks.

".Net is like a five-dimensional cube," says Peter Osbourne, group manager for advanced technology and decision support systems for Dollar Rent-A-Car. "I'm a mathematician and I know if you try to visualize that cube, you will never understand it. You need to look just at the pieces you can use."

In its basic form, .Net consists of development tools, server software and devices from PCs to phones that are smart enough to run applications locally or at the server.

Also included is prebuilt code that can snap into other applications. For example, a prebuilt calculator program accessible over the Internet could be called into a mortgage or loan program running on another Web site.

Microsoft's Bill Gates said last June that .Net will affect every piece of code the company writes, and that not a single product at Microsoft will go untouched by .Net. Microsoft is committing $2 billion through 2003 to help developers build .Net services.

The key for such integration is XML and its derivatives, which will be used to create standard application programming interfaces and so-called Web Services - chunks of reusable code.

The idealistic conclusion is that Microsoft is embracing standards for interoperability across servers, development languages, applications and devices. But critics fear .Net will evolve into another "embrace-and-extend" ploy through which Microsoft tweaks standards to its own liking.

"Microsoft is shooting for the same degree of dominance in Web computing that it had in the client/server model," warns Jamie Lewis, president of The Burton Group.

Today, what's of use in .Net is mostly aimed at Microsoft's legion of developers. These developers are relying on XML and its offspring, the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), an emerging standard for sending messages across the Internet that activate programs or applications regardless of their underlying infrastructure. Also useful are Universal Description, Discovery and Integration - a directory of companies and their XML interfaces - and Web Services Description Language, which describes what a piece of application code can do.

Companies are using the standards to create common interfaces that integrate unlike corporate systems. This fall, Microsoft hopes to make that exercise easier with the release of its Visual Studio.Net development tools and .Net Framework, programming interfaces that support multiple languages. Microsoft also created a programming language called C# that it submitted to the European Computer Manufacturers Association for consideration as a standard.

But today, to most companies .Net means using XML and SOAP to let systems talk to one another and share data - a goal that by no means defines just .Net. After all, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell and Sun are among

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