JD on EP

Simply ridicolous...
"One of the biggest reasons people upgrade their PCs is digital photos," - if they were to introduce a new backup program, they would have claimed that as a major reason for upgrading a PC. Microsoft lost so much credibility, well, maybe I just realized they never were supposed to have any.

I think Vista and support for the PNG format in Internet Explorer were supposed to appear at about the same time. Maybe this is why they've been waiting so long to support an image format that already offers better compression than JPG. As good as it might be, with Microsoft you always have to be suspicious that they want to push users to a proprietary format in their own OS. I don't believe that's what people expect in this day and age.

Lots of comment at Ars Technica and Slashdot.

That's an interesting point, Kim. I hadn't thought about it like that. Your comment is slightly misleading though. It's not correct to say that PNG already offeres better compression than JPEG. It depends on the content of the image you are trying to compress. PNG is meant to replace GIF, therefore it compresses images with hard color transitions well. JPEG compresses images with subtle tonal variations (such as most photos) to a smaller size than PNG, but with some quality loss. So it's typically best to use PNG for buttons, icons, etc. and to use JPEG for photos. There is no "best" image format, but the new Microsoft format sounds cool to me if it can create smaller files with better quality than JPEG and support things like an alpha channel. Let's hope they license in such a way where it can be of some use.

But you are right, it is kind of maddening that they might come out of this looking like a darling over their new format while they are the primary reason PNG can't be used to it's full potential today (and it's been around for years now).

After reading the spec doc (check the /. comments), I'm fully convinced it's an effort to make Windows look like a consumer friendly platform. Apple has the whole iLife suite going for it, and a focus on 'digital lifestyle'.

Why? WMPhoto provides for saving multimple images in one file. Imagine taking photos of the kids and e-mailing them to grandma in a single file instead of attaching 15 images. If grandma uses Vista. (She may kick the bucket by the time it ships anyway.)

MS is banking on "Windows Media ____" formats tied to Windows Media Player to be their digital lifestyle platform...which frankly is kind of sub-par. It's pretty well accepted that WMA compression is awful and WMV is losing out to Flash video. What makes them think adding a photo format is going to turn things around?

So where are the sample images showing off how Windows Media Photo compares to JPEG, JPEG2000, and PNG at a given file size? I googled, and even search.msn.com'd, and didn't find any. If *I* were announcing a spiffy new image compression format, you can bet I'd include sample images to demonstrate that spiffiness.

Huh?

While I understand that you might believe that Microsoft is the "primary" reason that PNG never took off, they are not the ONLY reason, and that is what many people might take away with them when reading a comment like that.

It's not like I'm a huge raving fan of Microsoft to begin with (hell, who is), but let's try looking at things as they are, rather than jumping on MS, which is so easy to do.

Plenty of other organizations had an opportunity to promote PNG, and in fact, Adobe COULD have been one of those companies.

Heck, maybe it WAS. If so, I heard very little about it. Photoshop and PS Elements.

Two good reasons to go ahead and move to the next Web graphics level, particularly when you put ImageReady into the mix.

To wait for the dominant web browser maker or other standards bodies (at the time) to call the shots regarding new image formats is not necessary, and, in fact, many other small shareware companies likely exploited this in a very nascent, not-terribly-noticeable way.

To be fair, not a lot of people jumped on this development, and that's a shame, though it hardly had much to do with much.

Mozilla and Netscape weren't exactly in a hurry to implement native in-browser PNG support, and Opera and Apple really weren't pushing any barriers there either, which frankly, was a bit surprising.

This is the sort of thing Steve Jobs might have used to effect, but didn't.

So who do we blame for our ultimate LACK of PNG support, despite the fact that maybe it really wasn't that big of a deal in the first place?

The W3? Microsoft? Feh.

Lynda Weinman and JASC (now owned by Corel, unfortunately) didn't really waste a lot of time getting in and getting their hands dirty on PNG when the PNG format first emerged.

They were probably the first most visible people to use and promote it (heck, JASC produced Animation Shop at the time so there was a significant incentive for them to do so as it was often paired with Paint Shop anyway), so it COULD have taken off, if a few more people had been willing to add to the bandwagon, moderate though it was, and is.

I guess my ultimate point is not everything needs to hang on Microsoft's approval in order to operate in most conventional markets and survive -

I mean sure, yeah, it helps, but it isn't an absolute essential in all cases for things to happen, to move forward.

And also, we don't always need to approve of Microsoft's moves in other areas (like monthly subscriptions to sites and features we neither asked for or ever wanted for new versions of PC operating systems).

While Vista looks nice, for many people it likely WON'T be a "must have" upgrade in the way they positioned Windows 95 and XP, though they will try to "encourage" people to move down that road, mostly by yanking support, tho (grimace).

And you can bet that a whole bunch of people who spent upwards of $1,500 plus on their sexy Digital SLRs won't be in any hurry to upgrade either, which raises an interesting point, when will (if some haven't already) ALL digicams move to having flash-capable upgradeability from a PC, if not the Net?

Nothing is carved in stone, but you can bet this thing will drag on until MS gets a piece of the action - they'll get a percentage of everyone's time (if not their money or their life) on this planet whether people like it, need it, or not.

So much for sounding balanced (grin)....