Long time to read, Sand Wedge.
I think that more are more MS will find 'LOB' applications interesting. However, MS has so far targeted horizontal applications. And horizontal applications are where you can make the big bucks. Word processing for example, the wp market looses more in revinue to piracy than the DM, WF, KM, imaging markets make in software, hardware and services. And WP does not require MS to hire one single direct sales person, channel management team etc. The product just sells itself through the retail channel. How easy can it get!
I once had a long, heated and not sober conversation with a MS product manager that was in Hawaii to speak at our dev conference. I was trying to convince him that MS should buy our VB dev tools and take over the imaging market. He asked me how many seats of imaging technology were being sold, and how many I though could be sold in three years. When I told him; low hundreds of thousand and then high hundreds of thousands. He replied that if MS owned a software product with such a low level of opportunity, they would shut it down to raid if for coders. And this after I lied about the size of the opportunity.
Now granted, DM will ultimately be a better market than pure imaging. What passes for a lucrative market to others leaves Bill cold. Bill wants to own the Internet, post modern television, space communication and any newly discovered forms of sexual pleasure! Anything less revolutionary he might leave to mortals. |
