Pentax and… Microsoft???
I’m honestly not sure what to make of this - seems like kind of a weird combination for a “cross-licensing” agreement. On the one hand, it will surely be good for Pentax to have a company with the weight of Microsoft backing it, but on the other hand I am leery of the direction MS might influence Pentax in. I fear that MS would push Pentax toward more flashy, mass-market, consumer-level electronics (aka toy cameras) and away from what I feel to be their greatest strength: Fantastic optics and well designed cameras.
I mean really - not to bash Microsoft, but how often do you hear the words “Microsoft” and “well-designed” in the same sentence. I cringe to think of the feature bloat 
Although to be fair, it is really to early for more than idle speculation. We’ll have to wait and see how this pans out.
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May 13th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Ed, you really should put the MS bashing away - beyond making cameras and PCs “just work” - this is a a noble cause btw. they’ve got plenty of pro-photo folk working on image formats, manipulation libraries, tools etc. They certainly seem to care about high-end photography.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Steve,
I’ve been a windows admin for the past 15 years, from win3.0/dos to vista. I’m currently an admin for a enterprise scale 2k3 AD domain with vista clients. Believe me I’m quite familiar with MS technology. I also know high level engineers at the company, and I know how their business/R&D/product development works. Believe me, you would not believe the horror stories some of the folks there could tell you about bungled product development (cough**vista**cough)
Anyway, that’s not to hate on MS per-se, to be fair they have some really excellent technologies. I think active directory is fantastic, for example - as well as Group Policy.
But they are *not* a camera company, at best they could claim “consumer imaging” Yeah, they are exploring some imaging technologies (JPEG2000 anyone?) but like I said, speaking from experience I’m not getting my hopes up.
On the other hand, as I mentioned, it is definitely a good thing that someone as big as MS is putting their weight behind Pentax - that’s just promising in a business sense.
Like I said, I’m reserving judgment, we’ll see what Pentax announces down the road. I just thought them to be rather strange bedfellows.