iView Media Pro has left its temporary home at Microsoft where the softies apparently didn't know what images were, why they might be important to Windows and Office users, and why they might want to manage them. As of yesterday, iView has a new home at Phase One, the makers of the Capture One raw converter. Phase One has a temporary offer of US$49 for Microsoft Expression Media 2 (normally US$199). Just use the code XMOFFER on checkout.
The trend for photographic software is to provide a full workflow experience: transfer, digital asset management, conversion, and export/print/show. Capture One already had a lot of that in the product, but this moves Phase One closer to being a Lightroom/Photoshop alternative (there are still some parts missing). Likewise, Bibble 5 did much the same thing, expanding their raw converter into something that can work for a relatively full workflow. But Phase One's acquisition of a very robust DAM product seems to indicate that they're going after Adobe here with a complete and top-of-the-line workflow system, not trying to flesh out a few features in their raw converter.
The gauntlet has been dropped for the other players to respond. In the future we're going to have only a handful of successful players at the full workflow game. Adobe's already there. Phase One appears to headed there. If you're a Mac user, Apple's mostly there. For big, robust, full featured solutions, there can only be three or four winners. So the table is already filling up.
One might say that Nikon has a workflow solution (Transfer, ViewNX, CaptureNX2), but it's highly idiosyncratic, awkward in UI, missing many needed features, is Nikon-specific, has unnecessary duplication, and has a long history of performance issues. It's not a solution I'd suggest as a first choice to anyone, even an all-Nikon user. Nikon will need a massive effort that's extremely well managed to keep up with the Joneses: Aperture 3, Bibble 5, Lightroom 3/Photoshop CS5, and Capture One 6 (my guess) set new levels of capability and consistency.
That's not to say that these four workflow solutions just mentioned do everything that's needed. I still find big issues with each for certain tasks, but at least they're closer to the mark than Nikon (or others) have managed. Photographer-centric, photographer-controlled, integrates-with-everything is the design goal. In that respect, you can see how the current Nikon solution fails: it's not photographer centric or controlled. It's tightly controlled by Nikon for what Nikon sees as needed. And they're not seeing broadly or deeply enough, let alone seeing the actual workflow photographers are using. That integrates-with-everything bit is another failing for Nikon. Simply put, Nikon's solution is Nikon centric. I don't care what Nikon thinks I need, I care about what I actually need. Nikon's software solution so far fails in so many ways, I'm not sure where to start in ticking those problems off. We'll see what Nikon manages to do with Capture NX3, but it's starting to fell more and more like Nikon's software will once again be a dead end. Nikon Photosecretary: dead. Nikon Scan: dead. Nikon PictureProject: dead. Sensing a theme here?
Meanwhile, if the core workflow products get substantially better, the does-one-thing software products have to get better, too. If you're selling just a raw converter, it has to be better than the converters in Aperture and Lightroom/ACR, which are now setting a pretty high bar to get over. Likewise, a panorama or HDR package needs to clearly excel over what Photoshop can do. The list goes on. Personally, I'm finding more and more of my specialized tools starting to look less interesting as the main core products rise higher and higher in capability.
What's going to happen is that we're going to see more and more consolidation on the software side, plus more players fall by the wayside as their specialty products don't outperform the main workflow ones. Is there really room for four third-party noise reduction programs long term? No. Is there room for a dozen or more stitching programs long term? No.
We're in a period where the software performance bar is up fairly high and getting higher. Large scale programming efforts like Adobe's have a momentum that keeps them pushing that bar higher. That puts pressure on the garage-shop and individual programmer types to find new unserved niches, consolidate into larger entities, or simply give up the struggle.