14 DAY TRIAL // Paint in Windows Vista has evolved to the level where it can now rival Adobe's Photoshop Creative Suite 3 on equal terms. Don't believe me? Then just watch the video embedded at the bottom. It will offer a new vista, I mean a new perspective over Paint. In this context Adobe's strategy to delay offering support with CS2 for Vista and to ignore the Home Basic edition of the operating system with CS3 will backfire as Microsoft's latest operating system moves to center stage. And of course that with Windows Vista as a vessel, Paint will become ubiquitous in no time. According to Microsoft, in the first six months of general availability Vista shipped in excess of 60 million licenses worldwide. That's no less than 60 million potential Paint users.
Well, the integration of Paint (at one time Paintbrush for Windows) into Windows 1.0 (out in November 1985) might have seemed a revolutionary move at the time, but the fact of the matter is that in Windows Vista, the program is nothing more than dead weight. Moreover, it is absurd how little Microsoft understood to grow this Windows component over the years. If you will take a look at the images included herein you will be able to compare Windows Paintbrush for Windows 3.0 and Paint in Windows Vista. Almost nothing has changed.
The is a superb collage of commentaries in the video that goes something like this: "The future is right around the corner. The future is now. The future is in the past!" And that's about right. Paint is nothing more than a fragment from the past. Microsoft threw a wig and put some lipstick on it, revamping the graphical user interface, updating the toolbar icons, default color palette and adding crop functionality, but paint still permits users to do digital graphics like its 1985.
The biggest limitation of Paint is the fact that Microsoft is shipping it included by default into the Windows platform. More functionality, something in the line of Paint.Net, a free, shared source project, also belonging to the Redmond company would take Paint into the dangerous area of middleware, stepping on Adobe's territory. Microsoft has little choice than to continue to include the handicapped and limp Paint into Windows, in the program's current form. And if users want a professional digital graphics editing software they will have to pay the price of a car for CS3, or turn to the inferior products from Corel.
