Part 1: The risk of innovation

It's always a beautiful thing when a small, ambitious software studio sets a goal to challenge the giants in a certain field, and through tremendous effort and innovative thinking, succeeds in creating a wonderful product that's a viable, cheaper and more functional alternative to the established leader in that field. As if to mock the giants, these small software studios prove that when you're small and the odds are against you, you have one important advantage: the freedom to make everything from scratch without thinking too much about standards, marketing strategies and what the customer expects from you. It's your goal to surprise the world with something never seen before, to show them how you like to do things. This is the story of “just another software company”... literally. The story of JASC software, and their brainchild – Paint Shop Pro.

Paint Shop Pro was a program that I discovered in 1998, when I was thirteen years old. I was so amazed by what it could do, and with what ease. I was so fascinated that it became almost an obsession. I can now say with good certainty that Paint Shop Pro was the program that got me interested in graphic design and perhaps defined my career from that point on. As I began to master the program, I also started comparing it with its main rival, Adobe Photoshop, which just like today, was the undisputed leader and trend-setter in the field, a noun, a verb and a synonym for graphic design. But it surprised me that for something so legendary, Photoshop had some features that were incredibly counter-intuitive compared to PSP. To this day, as if to preserve the tradition, Photoshop is still very counter-intuitive in many places such as Selection tools, clone stamps, background eraser, warp/smudge, vector tools and still lacks the interface customization capabilities of PSP. The Paint Shop Pro v/s Photoshop discussion is a vast subject, but from my experience, a well-mastered PSP could achieve an equal or better result than Photoshop at a fraction of the time, the cost and the system resources. It's true that PSP never did catch up with Photoshop in fields such as CMYK/print handling, digital painting/brush quality and cross-platform compatibility, but that wasn't enough to sway my opinion. I've managed to use Paint Shop Pro professionally, and even win many Photoshop contests, not to prove anything, but simply because for me PSP was clearly the better product.

Paint Shop Pro started out as a small project by Robert Voit, an airline pilot who wrote code as a hobby between flights, and whose hobby was so passionate that he managed to create a multi-million dollar enterprise around his signature product, Paint Shop Pro. The program was conceived two years after Adobe Photoshop, but with their smaller and more motivated staff, JASC software not only caught up, but outpaced Adobe by one full release by the year 2000. What amazed me most wasn't the quantity of the new releases, but the amount of improvements JASC always managed to fit in each year. It was like every version since 4.0 onwards was completely rewritten from scratch to make the software radically different from the previous version, but without adding anything unnecessary. Because the creators of PSP obviously put in so much thought and effort into the new interface and features, for more than seven years Paint Shop Pro was like an annual Christmas present that I couldn't wait to open, each year offering a thousand little surprises that I couldn't wait to uncover. The spirit of genuine joy however was slowly frozen by the cold hard reality that so many promising programs faced before – corporate takeover. At first, when I learned that JASC had been acquired by Corel, I tried to push away the intrusive thought that PSP would be ruined, killed off, or turned into bloatware. I even held the naïve belief that Corel could combine the great painting features in Painter with the editing power of PSP, fix some obvious CMYK and interface issues, thus creating the ultimate rival to Photoshop that would turn the market around. Sadly, I may have overestimated Corel's dedication to product quality, because as it turned out, the future of Paint Shop Pro was to be very grim. It could be best compared to that of a brand of soda: the endless desperate overmarketing of an old recipe.

NEXT - Part 2: The soda market