Innovation is always a risk, and risk is not what major corporations desire, especially if they already have a steady customer base. So why innovate at all?
That's a question I don't really have an answer to. Change equals risk, improvement requires effort and resources. Marketing a constantly bloating old product is easy (that's what ACD Systems did with ACDSee until free alternatives took its place). It's easier to hire an artist to make more picture stamps and let the marketeers think of new tools, than let the actual artist work on the artist's tools. For the last five years, the very few improvements Corel actually brought to PSP obviously weren't done by graphics specialists, but rather by marketing people who thought the program should appeal to certain focus groups. For example, by renaming Paint Shop Pro to Paint Shop Pro Photo, and then adding an “Ultimate” on top, Corel tried to target the growing number of amateur photographers. In the age of digital cameras it makes sense, however, instead of improving the existing photo-editing features in PSP or adding anything original, they decided to keep the old features untouched and embed a strange and quite amateurish “Express photo lab” into the core program, thus bloating it even further. Aside from the frequent name changes, Paint Shop Pro received several cosmetic makeovers: changing the color scheme from system Windows colors to a dull gray and finally a depressing dark scheme, without making any actual improvements to the interface.
Ironically, among the very few actual improvements under the “new Corel administration” were the make-up tools, such as tanning brushes, tooth whiteners, skin-smoothers, symbolic of the fact that Paint Shop Pro has been getting make-up jobs, while it really needed serious plastic surgery. Some of these tools were practically useless, like the “thinify” tool, which is supposed to make people look thinner by squeezing the image width.
The latest version, “Ultimate”, a.k.a. 12.5 relied entirely on marketing gimmicks to fool people into thinking it's a new product. As if out of desperation, Corel decided to stuff the PSP package with old software like Painter Essentials and additional toys such as new photo frames, picture tubes, and even a free USB stick. It's like Corel took a good look at all the stuff they had lying around the room, stuffed it into a box and put it up for sale. I wouldn't mind all that if I knew that Corel was secretly working on a radically improved next version, but I know they're not.
And thus we come to the main point I'm trying to make in this blog. Corel has been sleeping on the job for five years now, and it's about time they woke up and did a major overhaul. PSP can't keep on changing names and color styles, and eating up more resources while offering nothing more than it did five years (and five releases) ago. I've heard too many PSP users switch to Photoshop or say that they're sticking to PSP 7 or 8 because the newer ones take up too much resources without offering anything new and original. That's one of the reasons I started this peculiarly themed blog and maybe someday, when something original comes out, the time will come to take it down.
NEXT – Part 3: An overview of the last 8 releases of Paint Shop Pro
3 comments:
I was simply dying for some useful information about painting and found the same in your blog. Simply great stuff! I have forwarded your blog link to some of my friends as well. Hope you will keep writing about paint companies in the future as well.
They (Corel) didn't listen for a shit, number 14 is the worst yet (terrible really, in the sense that they are scrapping some good stuff and adding junk clutter to the way the program works). I can stand number 13, but you are right in a sense that 10 was a pretty good release... it is too bad they don't listen to the artists, because they could have a killer (above Photoshop, if they listened to the right people, artists)
This is super! You took the words out of my mouth (as if I could write this lol). But ... I am an experienced user as well, worked with psp7 and bought all the update (sucks) even psp14 but I will not use that one, it's really too bad! Thus I stay with psp13 and complain every day. I am a member of approx 40 groups, mostly Yahoo and a couple of Google, with more than 10,000 members and we all agree that psp is NOT getting better, just worse! Since Corel took over, psp has not improved a bit. Jacs listened to us and every new update you would find things that they had included after comments from us. I will stop buying the updates now and I know a lot of other members stopped a long time ago. I use psp every day up to 10 hours a day and 7 days a week and I have made more than 22.000 'creations' in the last 7,5 years using all the features psp offers. You go!!!
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