How Microsoft Can Make More Money
I know what you are thinking: How much more money does Microsoft need. Well from what I can see they need to make more because the stock I own has been flat for some time now.
So here’s my solution for Microsoft: How about taking some of the products you make and actually sell the damn things.
For instance: I recently bought a video camera that stores its video onto DVD’s. On friends advice I downloaded Microsoft Movie Maker. This is a cool product but lacks some basic common sense features. For instance you can load your video files into Movie Maker and then choose to use pieces of these video files as something known as a clip. Well here’s the rub. You can only create a clip using some very non precise slider type controls. How about letting me enter the stop and start time of the clip I want?
This is not meant as a rant about Movie Maker but just something to consider. Movie Maker does have some competitors Adobe Premier and a program called Vegas. Each of these products retails for around 600.00. So what this shows is that people that want better more sophisticated tools are willing to spend 600.00 for that privilege. So here’s a potential revenue stream for the Movie Maker team.
If the team responsible for Movie Maker actually had to sell it, Movie Maker might be a better product. Instead we get a half ass developed product that seems like a college software experiment rather than a great product.
Another example of Microsoft’s lack of vision comes from a comment Scoble made on his blog. Scoble like many other people uses Microsoft Messenger for IM. Messenger is a great way to have online conversations over the net. Well Scoble has something like 300 people in his contact list. The limit to the number of users in a contact list is 300. He said something like “I would pay 10.00 a month to remove this limit”. Sounds like a revenue stream to me. But in reality it is probably something Microsoft will not take on because the people that work there don’t really understand how to make money.