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I remember Deluxe Paint for DOS and the Amiga before Photoshop existed. I also remember Quark Express. Somehow Adobe ran them out of business or at least tryi

I remember Deluxe Paint for DOS and the Amiga before Photoshop existed. I also remember Quark Express. Somehow Adobe ran them out of business or at least trying to compete with them.

wineisfine 10y ago
Deluxe paint! Guybrush
- jjeaff 10y ago
  Easy to see why quark lost. In design had full color, on screen layout with pictures while quark had this ugly, difficult to use mess that put boxes with Xs in them denote where your picture would be and had some weird feature to show a terrible reproduction of the image like a rendering that had poor performance and may have been black and white only if I can remember correctly. This was long after wysiwyg editing was extremely common place in consumer software.
tajen 10y ago
I'm genuinely interested at your/anyone's analysis as to why Adobe has run out all its competitors for the last 20 years. I understand the "Everyone requires PSD files", but did Adobe have a major advantage? Did they have specific prices as some time to gain adoption? Did they draw out the competitors' best engineers?
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > but did Adobe have a major advantage? Basically, piracy. They've tolerated cracks and keygens all over the place up until CS6 (it always was just a keygen plus a couple entries in /etc/hosts) - which were mostly used by school kids who literally grew up using only Adobe products and so demanded Adobe products during their educational and professional life too. "Get 'em hooked while they're young" is a business strategy that can work very good.
- orionblastar 10y ago
  Adobe branches out into many different types of software for Windows and the Mac. They have more than just Photoshop. As I recall they gave a good student discount for education that the other competitors did not do. Once you get the students hooked on it, they beg their employers to buy it for them so they can use their skills on it. Also Adobe had Acrobat Reader, Shockwave, Flash and other free apps that would get people to their website and order Photoshop or the full package. Deluxe Paint was only for Amiga, DOS, and a few other platforms. It was used mostly for video games and designing graphics on it. Electonic Arts had it along with Game Construction games and other things. Quark was faster than Photoshop but cost more, Adobe had basically undercut them even if it wasn't as snappy as Quark could be. Paint.Net and The Gimp are too free/open source alternatives to Photoshop but can't match PS' filters and other things like plug-ins. In doing a bundle, Adobe did what Microsoft did for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc and made it into an Offie Suite. It really does not matter what company had a product out first, what matters is being able to bundle to lower the price, innovate, and offer a student discount, etc to get more customers. I used an Amiga 1000 with Deluxe Paint, it was fun, and did what I wanted it to do. It might have been out before Photoshop, but once Photoshop had plug-ins and filters and other stuff, it basically out-innovated Deluxe Paint and others. Then undercut them in price by bundling software.
mattkevan 10y ago
It was Quark that lost the game for themselves, mostly. Hubris and bad timing. Quark was really expensive, didn't support transparency (had to make shadows and overlays in PS and import in as TIFFs), and they totally botched the OSX transition with v5 which was again expensive and buggy. Adobe releasing Creative Suite which worked on OSX and cost less than the new version of Quark, meant it was a no-brainer considering you still needed photoshop and acrobat anyway. In its defence, Quark was really snappy - something Indesign has never matched.
- grzm 10y ago
  It was Quark that lost the game for themselves, mostly. Hubris and bad timing. That was my impression, too. Kinda sad. Quark was really snappy I remember QuarkXPress 3.32 being snappy; v4 seemed more sluggish, if memory serves. Moved from v4 to InDesign. Oh, boy. This is bringing back memories of system crashes. That's been a while.
- Angostura 10y ago
  Not only was Quark Express expensive, had had enforced incompatibility between point versions. So if you had a news room with 20 copies of 3.3.2 and employed a new person and 3.3.3 was out, you had to spend thousands on updating everyone else.

I remember Deluxe Paint for DOS and the Amiga before Photoshop existed. I also remember Quark Express. Somehow Adobe ran them out of business or at least trying to compete with them.

wineisfine 10y ago

Deluxe paint! Guybrush

jjeaff 10y ago
Easy to see why quark lost. In design had full color, on screen layout with pictures while quark had this ugly, difficult to use mess that put boxes with Xs in them denote where your picture would be and had some weird feature to show a terrible reproduction of the image like a rendering that had poor performance and may have been black and white only if I can remember correctly. This was long after wysiwyg editing was extremely common place in consumer software.

tajen 10y ago

I'm genuinely interested at your/anyone's analysis as to why Adobe has run out all its competitors for the last 20 years. I understand the "Everyone requires PSD files", but did Adobe have a major advantage? Did they have specific prices as some time to gain adoption? Did they draw out the competitors' best engineers?

mschuster91 10y ago
> but did Adobe have a major advantage? Basically, piracy. They've tolerated cracks and keygens all over the place up until CS6 (it always was just a keygen plus a couple entries in /etc/hosts) - which were mostly used by school kids who literally grew up using only Adobe products and so demanded Adobe products during their educational and professional life too. "Get 'em hooked while they're young" is a business strategy that can work very good.
orionblastar 10y ago
Adobe branches out into many different types of software for Windows and the Mac. They have more than just Photoshop. As I recall they gave a good student discount for education that the other competitors did not do. Once you get the students hooked on it, they beg their employers to buy it for them so they can use their skills on it. Also Adobe had Acrobat Reader, Shockwave, Flash and other free apps that would get people to their website and order Photoshop or the full package. Deluxe Paint was only for Amiga, DOS, and a few other platforms. It was used mostly for video games and designing graphics on it. Electonic Arts had it along with Game Construction games and other things. Quark was faster than Photoshop but cost more, Adobe had basically undercut them even if it wasn't as snappy as Quark could be. Paint.Net and The Gimp are too free/open source alternatives to Photoshop but can't match PS' filters and other things like plug-ins. In doing a bundle, Adobe did what Microsoft did for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc and made it into an Offie Suite. It really does not matter what company had a product out first, what matters is being able to bundle to lower the price, innovate, and offer a student discount, etc to get more customers. I used an Amiga 1000 with Deluxe Paint, it was fun, and did what I wanted it to do. It might have been out before Photoshop, but once Photoshop had plug-ins and filters and other stuff, it basically out-innovated Deluxe Paint and others. Then undercut them in price by bundling software.

mattkevan 10y ago

It was Quark that lost the game for themselves, mostly. Hubris and bad timing. Quark was really expensive, didn't support transparency (had to make shadows and overlays in PS and import in as TIFFs), and they totally botched the OSX transition with v5 which was again expensive and buggy. Adobe releasing Creative Suite which worked on OSX and cost less than the new version of Quark, meant it was a no-brainer considering you still needed photoshop and acrobat anyway. In its defence, Quark was really snappy - something Indesign has never matched.

grzm 10y ago
It was Quark that lost the game for themselves, mostly. Hubris and bad timing. That was my impression, too. Kinda sad. Quark was really snappy I remember QuarkXPress 3.32 being snappy; v4 seemed more sluggish, if memory serves. Moved from v4 to InDesign. Oh, boy. This is bringing back memories of system crashes. That's been a while.
Angostura 10y ago
Not only was Quark Express expensive, had had enforced incompatibility between point versions. So if you had a news room with 20 copies of 3.3.2 and employed a new person and 3.3.3 was out, you had to spend thousands on updating everyone else.