Microsoft perhaps may want to compete with Apple (Aperture) and Adobe (Lightroom). Given that these programs have been known about (and in Aperture's case, available) for a while already, I doubt that Microsoft's acquisition of iView is necessarily a knee-jerk reaction to Adobe's recent announcement. They've probably been thinking about it for a while, as one might guess from their other somewhat underwhelming attempts to "help" photographers (such as native RAW file support in Vista, which doesn't seem to exist yet though the beta is "feature complete").