What should M$ do with all that cash?

Now that it appears the anti-trust problems are more bark than bite (600+mil from EU), it is time to start thinking about how to spend that enormous cash hoarde that Redmond has been saving up. Last I heard it was in the neighborhood of 50 billion. Besides buying a few hundred small countries, someone up there has got to figure out what to do with all that money! I thought I would float a few proposals to get the ball rolling.

Buy Macromedia - They are getting increasingly innovative in their products and are starting to become a real player in the rich internet applications space which is a key to the MSFT forward strategy.

Invest in broadband - Find a way to make broadband access more widely available, preferably some sort of long range wireless play that can bring IP to remote/moving objects, the bright MSFT future is only a dream without widespread IP availability beyond the home and office.

Give away Dev tools - I don’t mind paying for them and with MSDN subscriptions you practically are giving it away, but; if the MSFT strategy for widespread adoption is to target developers you need to show some love and just start giving away Visual Studio. NO one can argue that VS.NET is not the cream of the crop dev tool; problem is that many people might avoid it for the fact of it's cost. Make it free and you might pick up a few hundred thousand loyal devs.

Finally - give some to me, I will spend it wisely ;)

4 Comments

  • The problem is that money belongs to our investors, not to us. So, we either need to give it back to them (through dividends, etc) or we need to show how spending it will actually increase their returns over investing it smartly.



    Also, we'd love to acquire things, but you need to think about the chances such an acquisition would be approved by the DOJ, et al.

  • Apple gives away their dev tools for free...of course they don't already have dominant market position, but you could argue the same for .Net and Longhorn.

  • Investing aggresively in broadband would also have the side effect that the size issue of the .Net framework for consumer desktop apps goes away :-)

  • They should invest it into jump-starting the space tourism industry. No, really. Paul Allen already funds Scaled composite's first private spaceship. I really hope that this is what they have in mind.

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