That's exactly what they said about the XP graphic format.

Leaving aside the fact that m$ will ALWAYS have some advantage over other OS vendors in using this format, didn't we already have a successor to jpeg called jpeg 2000? Anyone ever seen one of those?

The words "Microsoft" and "open" are about as synonymous as "Camel's hole in sandstorm" and "open"!

quite frankly, i don't see the point to it. it's not like i'm going to discontinue my current workflow. i take raw files, bring them into photoshop, adjust, retouch, add layers and effects and they're saved as new versions in my aperture library.

when i need to export to the web, i produce 800x600 pixel JPGs that are about 80-120 Kbytes. JPG is really just an intermediate format used for display on the web AFAIC.

i can see some usefullness if a point-n-shoot records its captures in this format to allow a higher bit-depth image without using a proprietary RAW format, but most point-n-shoot photographers aren't doing any editing to their shots anyway! they get the white balance wrong, then don't know how to fix it anyway!

so, this new format really seems like a solution in search of a problem.

I think its good. JPEG is, what, 20 years old now? Its time for an update. Hooray for Microsoft. The operating system may be ugly, but at least it can hold up pretty pictures.

as long as it has a license similar to the JPEG license. Everyone can use it and new devices can be made with it in mind. The MSFT format supports a higher dynamic range and a more compact, elegant scaling format. People can hate or love MSFT but the image format has inherent superiority over the original JPG format.

Again, as long as the license agreements are suitable, I would love Apple, Canon, etc to adopt it as soon as possible.

As long as it's totally open and MSFT has no control over it (or at least no more control than any other member of JPEG), I have no problem with it. But as Paulc said, who is going to use it? We've had JPEG 2000 for years now and that's gone nowhere. I exported a few things to that format once, but I stopped as soon as I realized that there was no guarantee that every client app would support it. Portability is going to trump "a wider and subtler range of tones" 99 times out of 100.

1) it has to be better

2) it has to work

3) it has to be open

4) it has to be widely adopted

Microsoft has trouble with all of those items, but if they accomplished them, I'd use it.

So where does the .png format stand in all this? Apple uses it for it's screen shot format. Is it a "standard" format? How does it compare quality-wise to the current JPEG and MS's next-gen JPEG format?

PNG files are awesome. I love them :) But the files are bigger than JPEG. It's like a replacement for TIFF and a replacement for GIF rolled into one. PNG's have variable transparency, unlike GIF, and have very effective LOSSLESS compression. Both are reasons Apple use it i'd say. It's completely open AND royalty free. However, as it's lossless you can't get really bite-sized files like you can with JPEG, which does so by throwing information our the window.