Actually I'm very happy about this. Almost 2 years ago I set out to create Tanjun'ka to solve the problems of quickly posting images on my blog. I got it to a workable state but development kind of came to stand still. You can read about it on the Tanjun'ka dev blog
Well, today or a couple of days ago Microsoft released what is basically the same product called Windows Live Writer solving the same issues in nearly the same way.
I'm glad they are doing it because it Tanjun'ka development stopped and no one ever even noticed it existed.
Windows Live Writer is only beta but a few comments.
They figured out a reasonable way to handle uploading graphics in both a small and large size together. I like their method. I thought about that a long time and was frustrated trying to come up with a solution. My issue was I wanted you to be able to edit both pictures separately. For example the thumbnail might just be one person's face where as the large picture might be the picture of an entire party of people. Still, the way they have it probably covers most people's needs.
I hope they add in Crop. They got rotate, and dynamic resizing but cropping is basically the number one thing I do to a picture before uploading. It's in Tanjun'ka. Of course without Crop the problem mentioned in the previous paragraph doesn't exist.
Not wanting to have to do too much work I was stuck relying on IE's HTML editor which is pretty crap. Windows Live Writer wrote their own so they can do a better job then I could so editing is nicer and their HTML isn't as crappy.
Windows Live Writer's spelling checker sucks. So does Tanjun'ka's. It's just that this is Microsoft, the company that introduced realtime spell checking so it would be awesome if they could ultimately add that so it worked like Word with red underlines for bad wordds.
Anyway, Windows Live Writer supports plugins I suspect we'll see lots of them that cover these features.
Now if we can just get a similar product so Wikis can have real wysiwyg editing with drag and drop images. It shouldn't be too hard using the same protocols except that editing previous entries becomes a much bigger problem than it is on blogs.
Oh, one more thing. Windows Live Writer supports standards so you can use it with any blogging system that supports those standards like Moveable Type, WordPress, Blogger, etc. Contrast this to Google's tools like Picasa or the Google Toolbar that only work with Google's stuff, Google doesn't support standards.