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Comment by fataliss | Hacker News Reader

For a second I thought it would be some kind of editor vim style but Microsoft made. But no, just an other photo app. Can you still generate any revenue out of this kind of app in 2014? I feel like the market is pretty dense already, between dropbox, instagram, flickr ... plenty of apps already in the landscape, why an other?

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It's by Microsoft Research. Not everything they make is meant to be a direct revenue driver.

Keyword being "direct". Publicly no doubt they have mission statements that read like they're trying to save the planet. Privately, they are tasked with exploring the margins of new paths to revenue. (NOTE: pure speculation.)

I don't feel like you are very familiar with Microsoft Research. While I'm sure Microsoft ultimately expects to benefit from their work, it's pretty far out there to suggest that their mission is discovering revenue streams or anything like that. Like, do you really believe Microsoft intends to monetize Haskell?

Well. To be fair, facebook did.

Facebook uses Haskell as a revenue stream? I was not at all aware of that (and still am not really, after some Googling).

They use it to make money...HAXL is quite a competitive advantage for them.

I did mention that I was speculating, so yes, I'm not at all familiar with Microsoft Research.

However, I've yet to work at a place where I wasn't surrounded by p* managers who weren't falling over themselves to get involved with some new idea that would lead to revenue somehow. On the business side of the house, I don't think anyone gets up in the morning if it can't be linked to revenue.

So, yeah, I'm comfortable saying that Microsoft Research is swarming with people looking for new revenue streams. Swarming.

Well, I don't really doubt the idea that justifies the department's existence is that Microsoft Research will produce new developments that can be used in money-making products, but the research itself is not necessarily linked to revenue in any real way. For example, the Haskell programming language and the experimental Singularity OS are things that really have no chance of ever themselves making Microsoft money, but Microsoft Research drove their development nonetheless. The most obvious underlying motivation is not finding revenue streams, but pushing the state of the art in ways that Microsoft can learn from and use to improve other projects.

That is wrong, how? Revenue streams (and corresponding cash flows) are the lifeblood of any business. It's a nice notion to build an organization solely to do cool things but, if you don't make money somehow you'll go out of business and will never be able to do cool things.

Same here! The name made me think I was going to see a vim 2.0 by Microsoft. I'm sure the majority of their target audience wouldn't have this kind of reaction.

Wow, I exactly felt the same. Microsoft made a vim editor?!.

(I'm using XVim every day, so Xim brainfckd me very hard)

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