Disclaimer: I do not work for Microsoft, but I am a Microsoft MVP. The following is all derived from public information, and any inferences or extrapolations are entirely the work of my imagination, and is not something that I know that Microsoft is working on. If I knew Microsoft was working on things like this, it would be covered under my non-disclosure agreement, and you wouldn’t be reading about it here. If you like (or hate) these ideas, let Microsoft know about it.
Back in December 2005 I had the post: Is Microsoft Planning to Make Visual Studio Standard Edition Free?, where I discussed some ideas I had about making the base Visual Studio free, and just selling the various plugins (did anyone happen to notice that Visual Studio happened to drop “.Net” from it’s name?). Lately I’ve been thinking about this some more, especially within the context of the whole software as a service idea. At some point in the future I’m sure that you will no longer buy a copy of things like Microsoft Office, and instead buy a yearly subscription (all under the Live.com realm). After working with various web based email sites (like GMail, Windows Live Mail, and Yahoo Mail), and seeing how they determine which ads to display based to you based on the content of the email you are viewing (or your previous email habits), you can see how this directed advertising can possibly become a better revenue generator then actually selling the product.
It is a natural evolution of contextual ad programs now found on a lot of websites (including mine), but instead of waiting for someone to find an advertisement while viewing someone else’s content, why not track their habits while they are creating content? Web based email was a very natural next step, but why stop there? If you will be able to buy an internet based version of Office in the future, it makes sense to have a version that is partially (or totally) subsidized by contextual advertising. I’m not entirely sure that the contextual algorithms are totally up to this task (at this moment), but I am sure that eventually, while you are busy writing some Word document for work, that Word will be able to display ads related to whatever you happened to be writing about. But, why do you have to be using a browser to get ads? Why not just put a little web services magic into your Windows based applications, and use it to add advertising to your nice Windows application. Sure, the user might not always be online, but these days, the majority of folks are connected to the internet at least some of the time, and you can use that time to cache the ads as needed.
This idea got me thinking a little more out of the box. If determining what ads to display to a user of a tool like Word is pretty hard to do (thanks to the total randomness of content), maybe a tool that is a little more specific on what it is used for might be a bit easier. It would be even better if the user was someone that is more likely to be connected to the internet on a regular basis. Then it hit me, why not Visual Studio? Microsoft knows what the users of Visual Studio are doing with their application, and the users are definitely more likely to be connected to the internet more then the average person.
This focused, potential audience does limit what type of advertisers would want to use this service, but it has to be a better option then advertising on websites and in magazines. Can you visualize yourself working on some code relating to the TabControl, and in the (proposed) advertising area of Visual Studio you get an ad for the new an improved TabControl that a 3rd party vendor makes? But it doesn’t have to limited to software vendors. I could see websites using this service to help promote their site (which will pay for its content via their own ads).
Since I don’t see this coming anytime before Vista and Orcas are released, I could even foresee using the new graphics capabilities of Windows Presentation Framework to “ghost” in the advertising right into the area that you are working in (which would eliminate the need for a separate advertising area, and make sure the user couldn’t miss the ad).
I could definitely see something like this making its way into the Express line of developer products, since they are free anyway. But what why stop at the Express editions and add this “feature” to Visual Studio Standard or Professional? How about the SQL Server Management Studio (it sure looks a lot like Visual Studio, anyway), or even the new Expression line? Would you be willing to pay less for these products if you were subjected to advertising baked into the product? I have no idea if Microsoft is even considering anything like this, but if I thought of it, odds are very good that someone with Microsoft has probably done the same, and is floating this idea within the company. Shoot, I’ve been working on a number of Visual Studio plugins, some totally free, but others that I’m thinking of selling, and I might be tempted to use something like this in the Visual Studio plugins that I was thinking of selling.