Two software packages that I highly recommend have been recently bought out by Google and Microsoft, respectively.

The first is Picasa which was bought by Google. My friend Chris introduced it to me, and I thank him for that. Picasa claims it is “the best home for your digital photographs”, and they’re right. Picasa sports a slick, intuitive interface that even Mac fans couldn’t knock, and allows you to easily do all the main things you would want to do with your photos. You can’t do serious photo editing, but for that you’d use Photoshop anyway, right? You can now get Picasa right off of Google’s main page, and I’m sure that in the future you can find it easily just by searching Google for “Picasa”.

The second is a utility called LookOut, which is a search tool for Outlook that Microsoft purchased. This is one of those acquisitions that is so obvious that you almost worry that it won’t happen. I’m glad it has. LookOut has some amazing indexing and search functionality built in - it’s sort of like having Google for your email (and it can index files on your hard drive as well). You can get LookOut here. Whoops! It looks like Microsoft isn’t going to be actively distributing LookOut, so they’ve removed the download link. Good thing you can still get it here. (That’s what I love about the web - you can always find something if you look hard enough!)

My personal take on this is that both Microsoft and Google are trying to play in each other’s back yards. Microsoft buys the tool that people are calling “Google for Outlook”, and with Microsoft Research recently showing off their image management solution (which looks very cool), Google goes and purchases the best available software package in that vein. I say, “Fight, Fight!!!”, particularly if it means more free cool stuff!