Microsoft chairman Mr Bill Gates has rolled out his bid to catapult Microsoft's Web-based applications platform, .NET, ahead of the Java programs favoured by many businesses.
"About three years ago we bet the company on this web services paradigm," Mr Gates told an auditorium full of Windows developers waiting to get a look at the application developer tools, known as Visual Studio. He showed off applications created using Visual Studio by L'Oreal and Merrill Lynch.
The company has spent about $2 billion on research and development on Visual Studio over the last three years, a spokesman said.
According to Gates, interest has been phenomenal, with more than 6,000 customers and 3.5 million developers using the tools under an early-release beta test program. Microsoft vice-president of developer marketing and enterprise tools Mr Tom Button said it expects two million developers to adopt .Net within a year.
The applications are targeted at the corporate market and enterprises that have been using the Java development language for years.
Microsoft is pitted directly against web-services efforts, led by Sun Microsystems, IBM and others, whose programming language of choice is Java.
Analysts said although Microsoft will be able to convince small and medium-size companies to move to .NET, larger enterprises will be harder to convert.