This will be an interestig debate over the coming months/ years to see who wins out between Microsoft's WMPhoto Spec and Adobe's Tiff format. The microsoft specification, though positioned as an evolution of the JPEG standard,is closer in format to Adobe's Tiff format. Of particular interest to photographers is that The Micorosft WMPhoto defines both colour spaces (OK, so we can debate how detailed the spec is in this area) and also 8, 16 and floating point precision plus lossy and lossless encoding.
This will be one helluva codec to fully implement, though obviously a camera manufacturer will pick and choose which parts they want to support.
Whatever anyones perceptions/views of Microsoft it is about time that Adobe had some competition for file format mind share and development - Tiff evoution/development has virtually stagnated and DNG isn't going anywhere particularly quickly.