Is it 4 years ago that I was doing an iView presentation to photographers at Old Trafford, finally getting my chance to perform at United’s “theatre of dreams”. My talk ended at 5pm, the same time as the embargo was lifted on the news that Microsoft had just bought the product, so I was able to finish the presentation with a last minute showstopper (even if Beardsworth seems as unlikely as Michael Owen to be listed with Scholes, Rooney….) Sadly, though iView/Expression Media made a couple of appearances, soon this promising young player seemed forgotten in the reserves. More like the theatre of base comedy.

Around the same time, two or three years back, PhaseOne and Microsoft seemed quite close for a while. There was a technology partnership, whatever that term may mean, I heard rumours of Microsoft investing in PhaseOne, and you could certainly see some logic to the relationship. Microsoft had rebranded iView as Expression Media, so gobbling up PhaseOne and combining the two would have given Redmond a route to a product in the Lightroom-Aperture space. But that development never happened, I heard the iView developers who had relocated to the US moved on, and Microsoft didn’t seem to know what to do with Expression Media. For the last year or so, it seemed like a dead duck, neither walking nor quacking.

Then a couple of days ago, someone dropped a hint that there might be some news, which turns out to be that PhaseOne had swooped. As with Microsoft, there’s now a chance that if Phase One devote the resources to develop the product, they now have the opportunity to build a workflow application themselves, and it would begin with the advantage of being able to catalogue whatever type of file the photographer chooses. As with Microsoft’s ownership, only time will tell if it’s good news for iView. At least it’s now free to be loved again.