Whether or not Microsoft achieves what it has set out to achieve with .NET, it cannot be denied that the way we design applications is going to undergo some changes. With the advent of e-commerce and B2B exchanges, there is already a need for interconnected applications which communicate via an enterprise network or through the Internet.
With this in mind, we can see that with .NET, Microsoft's main aim is to supply tools which can be used to develop applications as easily as Visual Basic did a few years ago, during the golden age of the client-server application.