quote:
Originally posted by CookieRevised
And as hinted by Rolando, each department in MS has his own revenue, costs, budget, etc. So there is no such thing as "M$ makes serious moolah". It doesn't matter at all. Thinking that shows you have a misconception of how companies work.
If there is no budget for developping the Messenger client product, it will be scraped, simple as that, no matter if another MS product "makes serious moolah" or not.
This isn't only so in MS, this is so for almost every company in the world. This is even how governments work. For each product/service there is a seperate budget and revenue model which is independant from other products/services.
And for the free Messenger client (which will always stay free) the revenue comes from ads (and a few payed content stuff thingies).
Al this is also the exact reason why Patchou decided to remove the option to hide the advertisements.
Remove the ads and you remove a very big part of the budget used to pay the people making Messenger, the used servers, etc... and Messenger development will eventually be scraped.
The fact that M$ makes serious moolah means that all their projects can have much higher budgets than the same project would have if it was being developed by some other company.
Why else do you think they kept building Xboxes when doing so meant a negative income? They changed that with the Xbox 360 and the detachable/optional harddrive though, but still.
It's not like they NEED it. It's probably more of an opportunity type thing. They CAN put ads there, so they do.