Of course, that's where Microsoft's dumb name probably came from. They already had COM, needed a new name (COM+ sucked) so they went NET.

They went with .NET because it was supposed to bring DCOM into the Cloud via SOAP.

Except Cloud still wasn't a thing back then, and we had to go through the whole SOAP, XML-RPC, REST but not really, GraphQL, gRPC fashion cycle to come back to Microsoft's vision of Web APIs.