I learned on Friday that two of my favorite programs have been purchased by much larger companies Picassa, a photo indexing program, was purchased by Google. Lookout, a plugin for Outlook that indexes and searches email, was purchased by Microsoft. Both of these programs are great pieces of software and I'm sure they'll both get better with a little more money dedicated to them.
The only thing that I find somewhat ironic is the current state of both of these projects. Lookout was a free plugin, but now that it is owned by Microsoft, it is no longer available for download and from the FAQ, it seems like it'll be a while before a new version will be available. On the other hand, Picassa used to cost $30 and have a 30 day trial. Now that Google owns them, It's available for free and Google is advertising it on their main page.
Google is making a great product available to anyone and Microsoft is making a great product unavailable to everyone.
Crossposted from dmihalik.com