Pigboy (good name for an investor),
What MetaTools does with its 3D technology is the $64 question. Both operating systems and browsers would be much more intuitive if they used good 3D interfaces rather than the current 20-year-old PARC/Apple/Windows approaches. Just spending a little time in one of the virtual worlds done in VRML on the web gives you a taste of the huge potential there. The current way of navigating is showing its limitations. Both Netscape and Explorer make you feel like a rat in a maze--when you go off on a tangent you lose track of the other tangents you've been on. Forward and Back just aren't enough. It would be neat for MetaTools to come out with a 3D shell for the current browsers. I'm sure it would be interesting and fun. But it's pretty much of a long-shot. You've maybe seen some of the 3D shells that people created for Windows. Some were interesting, but none of them really caught on, because the benefit of the better interface wasn't worth the hassle for most people
I think there is a danger in MetaTools putting too much of their resources on these clever consumer products. With Goo, they won awards for how well they promoted it. They created great expectations and drove up their stock price--temporarily. But you have to sell a LOT of $50 products to build a big company. You need hit after hit to keep coming year after year, because these things ride a wave for a while and then they're done. To succeed at this sort of thing you have to spread your bets over lots of products, like a book publisher or a movie studio. Look at Broderbund and Myst. The revenues from Myst pumped up Broderbund for a while, but then what? Some low-end stuff is great, but I believe that MetaDesign should continue to push the fontiers of products that offer real utility to graphic artists, because this is a niche they can surely dominate if they choose to.
Here's the sort of product that I wish MetaTools would do: a $249 photo retouching tool that outperformed Photoshop. Most people just use Photoshop for photos anyway, so why should they pay the huge pricetag just for that. MetaTools could grab a share of that market if they offered better functionality at a lower price. For good measure, they could do like Corel and bundle in a bunch of KPT filters and a bunch of Power Photos. It would be a winner.
The idea of another $50 product (if that is what Soap is) to clean up photos strikes me as MetaTools trying to beat Adobe's PhotoDeluxe and Microsoft's Picture It in a market where the larger companies have a big headstart. It's all about OEM deals, and it will be very hard for MetaTools to beat Adobe and Microsoft for these deals. On the other hand, to play in the consumer market means spending huge sums on advertising, which destroys profits.
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