NewNewsWire just informed me that Microsoft has bought iView Multimedia, makers of iView Media Pro. I’ve used iView as my primary image cataloging program for over 4 years, so I’m a little disturbed by this. Microsoft claims that they aren’t going to kill the Mac version off, but, well, they’re Microsoft. They have a long history of buying companies and bending their future products towards Microsoft’s strategic needs, ignoring their existing customers.

All in all, I’m really not very worried. I’m still running iView Media Pro 2.x, because I couldn’t see the point in paying $100 or so to upgrade to version 3.x right now. I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom for most of my recent image manipulation needs, and it has enough overlap with iView that I probably won’t end up using iView much longer.

Anyway, congratulations to the iView team on their acquisition, and good luck to iView users everywhere. Hopefully Microsoft will be good for iView and its users.