Not one of the tandoori-chewing DAM glitterati, Mike Tedesco is Microsoft's Technical Evangelist - Pro Photo Community, and is therefore considered by some Apple-brand loyalists to be second to antichrist. He gives some responses to the iView takeover in this dpReview thread.

Thom Hogan's comments are perhaps closest to my own speculation. When I was told the news, my initial reaction was Microsoft will take iView downmarket - the Picasa strategy. But I soon began to think the junior product, iView Media, might well go that way, while MediaPro will surely continue its upmarket course. That was behind my analogy with Microsoft's move into financial software where they made a number of key acquisitions and built on them, added SQL databases, VBA editors, and configured them for application servers and remote usage, with proprietary technologies of course.

We all know iView has some problems moving up into multiuser network environments and that the file and database structure is limiting. So this might well be Microsoft's intention - and iView's urgent need before the DAMP (DAM+raw processing) programs sweep all before them.

In Microsoft's shoes I'd be scooping up Capture One, bolting it onto a potentially-multiuser iView and going straight for Aperture and Lightroom. It needn't be one product, but a largely cosmetic marriage of standalone programs like Word, Access and Excel. Buttons would “Open in Microsoft Capture”, “Copy Capture Settings”, “Paste Capture Settings”, or “Capture Batch”.

On the other hand, it could be left neglected in a dark annex of the evil empire and Yan, Phil and co will just have a year shivering in the Seattle rain. Time will tell, and after reading all that Apple-brand moaning I'm sure apocalyptic predictions aboout iView are best left to Nostradamus….