When John Shewchuk, Robert Wahbe and Brad Lovering met for grilled steaks at Lovering’s Seattle-area home in 2000, lutkefisk (Norway’s most famous dish) might have been more appropriate. After all, that meeting paved the way for Oslo, Microsoft’s new distributed computing/modeling platform, which the company will unwrap next month at its Professional Developers Conference.

At that seminal meeting, the trio had no idea how far their idea would carry them, but they did realize they were making a big bet that could take Microsoft beyond the .NET era and deeply into Web services, SOA (service-oriented architecture), software modeling and cloud computing.

In short, the trio was looking to advance Microsoft’s play in the world of distributed computing. “Advance” may be putting it mildly. The trio thrust Microsoft into a decadelong effort to emerge as a driving force in the world of distributed computing and to push Microsoft’s core enterprise technologies to become prominent in both on-premises environments and what we now refer to as “the cloud.”

Back then, only a select few were talking about “on demand” or “utility computing,” with Microsoft notably absent from the picture. Lovering and Shewchuk are both Microsoft technical fellows—Microsoft’s top technical honor—in the company’s Connected Systems Division. Lovering is leading Microsoft’s effort to implement a software modeling strategy, and Shewchuk is working to service-enable some of Microsoft’s core technology.

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