Thoughts on: “Microsoft should reinvest in MS Paint, and these artists prove it”
This piece from Windows Central did make me think about the built-in Windows 10 apps for the first time in a while. I don’t use Windows 10 as my primary OS on a daily basis anymore and oftentimes I think that in our quest for new, shiny things we often forget about the built-in applications. Apple has historically been great at bundling in powerful applications like iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb, and GarageBand in the past and I always felt like Microsoft really had a missed opportunity there. I understand that this is a third party opportunity, but for a huge amount of people, whatever Windows has built into it is simply what they are using because they cannot afford more, I was certainly like that for the first decade of me using computers, I simply could not afford to buy software. Microsoft Photos is embarrassing compared to Apple Photos, the successor of iPhoto and even Google Photos at this point in its ability to organize, tag, edit, and share photos. Furthermore, there is not really a good video editor built into Windows anymore like the entry level Windows Movie maker and there has never been a good music/podcast editing application. I do think that perhaps there could be a space for a Windows Live Writer-like application that served as a digital journal that could post to social media websites like Instagram, Facebook, Medium, Twitter, Tiktok, etc. Make it private by default and allow people to publish their content to a variety of services. Like Office365, I do think that there is a business opportunity to either sell people more OneDrive storage, Office365 subscriptions, or premium features of these applications. I know development costs money, but with COVID, we did see that the gears of industry and education is still a classic Windows PC, which ChromeOS following up behind now. I think that the built-in applications is a good way for Microsoft to distinguish itself from ChromeOS in the education and home markets and there is an entire population of people who will never want or need to step up to the expensive Adobe Creative Cloud suite. I really do hope that if the rumor is true that we’ll be getting a Windows 10 revamp later this year in the form of “Sun Valley”, that Microsoft will take a serious look at the built-in applications and try to bring Windows into the new decade.
