Microsoft Pro Photo Summit

Are you a pro photographer or "industry influential" (in MS's words)? You might want to look into attending the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit. Microsoft has slowly and methodically become a force in digital photography, not just because they control the OS on 90% of the world's PCs but because they've worked at it. Their first digital imaging application other than Paint was PictureIt! which shipped in 1995 and had some very innovative features.

I'm sure one of the hot topics of conversation will be the new alternative to JPEG MS has proposed called Windows Media Photo (CNET News Article). With their recent breakdown in talks with Adobe about support for PDF in Office 2007 (Bloomberg News Story) it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Photoshop is the standard for pro photographers and most advanced amateurs - Adobe has been leading the effort on a Digital Negative Specification trying to unite various flavors of RAW files.