Good in depth article here. Link from OS News.
I started using .NET when it was in technical preview at the beginning of 2000; at that time it was called COM+2 and the main language was something called Cool. The framework briefly became Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS) before some marketing wonk came up with a term that really would confuse Internet search engines: .NET. How many times have you been asked what .NET means and what relationship it has to .COM and .ORG? Of course, Cool faired no better. Some bright spark decided to call it C#, which initially confused search engines and users alike. The search engines did not like the # character and the users did not know how to pronounce it (C-pound? Or for those of us on the eastern side of the Atlantic, C-hash?). Almost the first thing I posted on the technical preview newsgroups was a simple console application in Cool, and its equivalent in Java with the rhetoric question to spot the difference. That solicited a robust response from the Visual Studio Product Manager who didn’t really see the point that I was making.