RSSMicrosoft Unveils Photo, Video Suite
By Aaron Dobbins | Published November 1, 2005, 11:06 AM
Just in time for the holidays, Microsoft on Tuesday took the wraps off Digital Image Suite Plus, which bundles the company's photo editing and organization tool of the same name with Pinnacle Studio 10.0 - a popular video editing application for creating home movies.
Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPhoto, Digital Image Suite 2006, lets users create a photo library using keywords, flags and a "star rating" system, along with effects to pictures such as a black and white filter. RAW images from Canon and Nikon cameras are supported in the latest release.
The suite also includes Photo Story 3.1, Microsoft's tool for adding music and narration to a slideshow in order to create what it calls a "photo show" for playback on a computer.
Pinnacle Studio version 10, meanwhile, focuses on pro-sumer video editing. Users can follow a three-step movie creation process, utilizing features for zooming and adding music and titles, alongside detailed tutorials. Pinnacle Studio individually retails for around $70 USD, although a $20 rebate is available.
Although Microsoft has a history of tapping third-party applications for special software bundles, the Pinnacle package is seen by some as a small announcement with big implications. With Adobe and others like Yahoo and Google focusing more on the consumer photo and video space, Microsoft is ostensibly turning to its favorite partners to stay relevant.
Digital Image Suite Plus is priced at $130 USD with a $30 mail-in rebate available, and will be sold at retail outlets and online. The bundle closely matches the price of Digital Image Suite 2006 on its own, which costs around $100 USD.
"If I were Microsoft, I'd hire a new marketing team"
Ha ! Microsoft is in process of taking overall managment of the company away from the techies and giving it to their marketing guys !
Their tech people can't develop the simplest innovations in cycles of less than a half-dozen years, and their marketing people have all the creativity of former-Soviet Union bureaucrats.
Microsoft should take a hint from Apple and come out with incremental upgrades to Windows XP every 15 minutes !
The Computer Rodent
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|Don't knock it till you've tried it. This is neither a stupid nor an overpriced package, the interface is better for being less toy-like than Picasa, and the feature set is absolutely *huge*.
It is close to the best way I've found to archive a large image library, has excellent image manipulation tools (doing away with the need for Photoshop for most people), handles RAW files great, does decent panoramic stitching -- and all that is just the image side of things, I haven't even begun to use the video possibilities.
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|How is this better than Picasa?
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|Hmmm... iPhoto comes with iLife, which is packaged freely with new Apples...
Digital Image Suite Plus is $130, has a rebate offer, and really lame name and is a bundle of 3rd party.
When most video cards that can handle video in / out come with software -- often Pinnacle Studio -- this sounds like a rather stupid, overpriced package.
If I were Microsoft, I'd hire a new marketing team and start to research how to be competitive on pricing, quality, and establish better name brand recognition. Sticking an 'i' infront of everything is genious as it homogenizes the concept of Apple's suite of tools.
[zzz]
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|Micosoft so much wants to be like Apple. But this isn't the answer
Forget it, get the real deal.
http://www.apple.com/aperture/
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|MS wants to be like Apple? If this is true, MS should sell off:
- The server division
- The database group
- The messaging group
- The Office group
- The ERP groups
- The new anti-virus & anti-spyware groups
- The gaming divsion (Xbox + software)
- Numerous other software groups (mapping, etc.)
- MSN plus search engine groups
- etc...
- Don't forget the core OS kernel programmers
Once they sell all these groups and fire all the employees, then they can focus on:
- creating a pretty UI for an exsiting OS
- running the driver model backwards in time and closing the hardware arcitecture to most vendors
- Creating pretty apps for home users and providing little value to corporate types.
- Selling handheld music players to fund the rest of the buisness
If MS does all of these things, then yes they will be like Apple and hold 3% of the total desktop computer marketshare.
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