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I actually find this pretty disappointing since Expression Media was originally iView Media Pro which Microsoft bought just a few years back. Of course the big concern was what MS would do with the product once they had it. Ironically, a lot of people (myself included) felt MS would do more harm to the app than good. Arguably, that’s exactly what’s happened. Hopefully it will have a good home now.

Microsoft has sold its Expression Media digital-asset-management application to digital-photography vendor Phase One for an undisclosed amount.

Starting May 25, Phase One is handling customer support and future development for Expression Media. Microsoft will continue to offer support for Expression Media retail customers for the next 90 days, officials said.

Another thing that’s unusual is that Microsoft is still stating they’re making competitor products to Adobe’s photography offerings. Quite some time ago they touted there would be a Photoshop equivalent, which of course never materialized. Now, Microsoft is claiming they will have a Lightroom competitor. I won’t hold my breath waiting for that one to appear.

Let’s see, Microsoft’s JPG killer didn’t take off. They’re PDF killer didn’t take off. They’re Flash killer hasn’t made much of a dent. And now they ditched the last of their photography apps. Microsoft has struck out against Adobe a couple of times and now they’re selling off one photo app with grand plans to launch another? Certainly makes me want to buy what they’re offering! Stable, very stable.

Further, Lightroom is on version 3 and has been incredibly successful from day one. It gained a massive and loyal following while it was still in beta and continues to be incredibly successful. I’m a huge fan of it and considering how well it’s been received and I can’t even conceive of a product Microsoft could offer that would best it in features and usability. I really think Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree here.

Microsoft is continuing to make investments in the professional photography space. Microsoft’s FUSE Labs is working on SmartFlow — a competitor to Adobe Lightroom that will include social-networking hooks.

Microsoft sells off one of its Expression products

I’m not that big a fan of Office 2007. In fact, 2007 is a rather bloated and slow bundle that really doesn’t seem to offer any more features than what 2003 did. It has a new UI but I can’t say I’m that big of a fan of it. As far as Word is concerned about the only thing they added was its ability to post to blogs (which really isn’t that good if you ask me). Excel is Excel and for 90% of us you won’t see a difference in the way it works. You might see a shortcut here and there, but you won’t fall out of your chair with excitement.

OneNote however got some really nice updates with moving tabs and copy/paste (which really should have been in the 2003 version). 2003 is a great version but 2007 seems like it’s more of a finished product. Of course I’m shocked at the install footprint of 400+ MB. How is it 2003 was about 120MB and this version is nearly four times the size? Now, there’s not four times worth of new features that’s for sure.

Well, Microsoft has finally seen that giving people beta versions to work with is a good idea and they’re offering up Office 2010 for download. I can’t run it at work since it won’t (yet again) run on Windows XP 64-bit. I’m considering installing it at home just because I want to see what OneNote has to offer. As far as I’m concerned you really can’t put more into Word. It’s reached feature saturation. All they seem to be doing now is trying to make it more web aware and PDF capable. That’s all fine and dandy, but as far as writing tools go, Word peaked with the 2003 version.

OneNote still has plenty of room to grow and quite honestly if they would put grammar checking into OneNote I would actually ditch Word.

I’m a little curious to see what Outlook has to offer, but considering its still such a hodgepodge of ideas thrown into that app, I doubt it will ever make sense. Or run correctly.

Download Office 2010 Beta

I find this almost laughable. It’s interesting that Microsoft is even entertaining the idea of making a Lightroom competitor. Several years back there was talk of a Photoshop killer coming from Microsoft; obviously that never happened.

But even when they did create a photography “package” (Picture It) it failed to gain wide acceptance and his since been discontinued. I never used that application so I really can’t say if it was any good or not. However, when it comes to photography software Microsoft is not the first name that comes to mind.

If you’ve ever used Lightroom I’m sure you’ll agree Microsoft has a long to way to go before they can even claim they will have a competitive product.

Microsoft still working on an Adobe Lightroom competitor
Microsoft discontinues Picture It