How should Microsoft spend $49bn? Perhaps they could start again from the beginning.

Microsoft said last week it plans to hire 4,000 to 5,000 new workers and to increase research spending by about 8 percent, to $6.9bn (£4.24bn) per year. The company also said it has $49bn lying around collecting interest. hhhmmm small change I guess. So what should they be spending this money on? Whats your view.

GIMME GIMME GIMME (a (wo)man after midnight) :D

A million £ would do, they wouldn't even notice it

interesting point

how about buying a couple of small planets?

How many sweeties would that be, then ? :eek:

are we talking Mars bars or "Hundreds and Thousands" ( an old Dad's Army line)

...they can find some way to remove all their HotMail subscribers from the multiple spam lists, ideally without telling the companies responsible for the spam. They should also resolve, on pain of death, never to repeat the fiasco regarding the checkboxes in HotMail.

Next, they can write an open source version of Windows.

Making the Registry a bit more legible would help - I can understand storing keys etc. in hex, but displaying them like that? What exactly are you supposed to make of the class IDs when they're just apparently random strings of hex digits?

Since Microsoft now own Apple (is that still true?), they should develop a version of Windows that works on Motorola processors - for anyone who's done assembler programming, I can tell you from experience that programming in 68000 Assembler is a joy compared to 80386 Assembler. The Motorola chips have a cleaner, more efficient architecture, and to the best of my knowledge they don't have to run hot enough to fry eggs on. Combine Motorola chip power with, say, Win 2000, and you'd really have something.