What Is the need for .NET?

Before .Net we used to use COM, CORBA etc.. for communications.
Let us see them in detail now:

COM :
was used for communication among Microsoft applications on a single machine whereas DCOM was used to communicate with remote hosts

CORBA from SUN, IBM, APPLE etc:
Unlike COM, CORBA was much better at passing messages across different operating systems. Unfortunately, the protocol was resource-intensive and difficult to program, and its use never lived up to its promise.

Later Microsoft Improved its existing COM Technology to what is now called COM+ Technology.

Improved Technologies from Microsoft:
Introduced COM+, Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), and Distributed Network Architecture (DNA) architectures. They didn’t work very well when the operating platforms were heterogeneous.

So in this way the need for .NET arised and Microsoft never gave up to develop a much advanced tool through which communications were possible.