(In short: it looks like Microsoft removed Quicktime support from a social photo sharing tool and thereby crucially handicapped the tool because the exported files are now too large to share. Too bad.)
Microsoft's PhotoStory is a great tool to take a bunch of pictures, put tem in a sequence, narrate your personal stories and export. It is based on some solid research: PhotoStory: Preserving Emotion in Digital Photo Sharing. Internal paper. (Vronay, D., Farnham, S., Davis, J. (2001)), and is one of the few pieces of software that really tries to address some of the sharing challenges with digital pictures.
But, and this is a major but: the files it creates are too large, which makes it really hard to share stories (hard to email a 5 Meg or 20 Meg file). From my experience with optimizing video and pictures, it really should be able to optimize the end result a lot more. It's crucial: I payed for Photostory in order to share stories with my family in Belgium, but the files are too large to email. It defeats the purpose.
Now, and this is where it gets interesting, the paper (see above) mentions exporting as Quicktime: "The advantages PhotoStory offers come at a download size that is not much larger than the photos themselves. Unlike a video, which needs every frame rendered in the file, QuickTime can produce the movie using a single frame for each image, plus a small number of additional bytes for specifying the visual effects and motion."
Photostory does not allow you to export Quicktime. It only exports Microsoft Media Player files. And, as far as I can tell, the files it exports are way too large for what's in there.
So, assuming Quicktime could indeed produce files a lot smaller than WMP, Photostory, a tool for sharing emotional stories through pictures, has been seriously handicapped in its purpose by Microsoft when they removed Quicktime support. I'm annoyed because I want to use this!