Jasc Software

» see jasc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Robert Voit flew DC-9s and then went and got a computer science degree in St. Cloud, Minnesota, which is an unusual route into a graphics company. He wrote a file converter in 1990 and incorporated around it in 1991. When the incorporation papers needed a company name he put down Just Another Software Company, as a joke, and the abbreviation stuck hard enough that he later gave it a respectable expansion, Jets and Software Company, which at least matched the flying.

What the company became is easy to state and was unusual for its decade. Jasc sat in a Minneapolis suburb and stayed privately held, selling to individuals who downloaded a trial and later paid for it. At the time of the sale it had about 120 employees and was turning over more than thirty million dollars a year. There was no boxed-goods empire underneath that and no venture board to answer to, and the whole thing ran out of an office park in Eden Prairie.

The catalog was wider than people remember. Paint Shop Pro carried the name, but Jasc also shipped Animation Shop, Image Robot for batch processing, Media Center Plus for cataloging, WebDraw for vector work on the web and After Shot, which later came back as Paint Shop Photo Album. Most of these were small and none of them were famous. They existed because a download business with a mailing list can sell a second thing to the people who bought the first thing, which is the model half the software industry rediscovered fifteen years later and called something else.

Here is the part of Jasc's business that never worked in Turkey, and it is the payment rail rather than the product. The company's revenue depended on a person with a credit card clicking through and registering their trial. A Turkish teenager in 1999 did not have a credit card, and an international money order meant a trip to a bank branch and a fee that was a meaningful fraction of the license. Jasc therefore had an enormous Turkish install base and approximately no Turkish revenue, and the same was true across most of the countries where its software was genuinely everywhere.

~ the case file ~

~ the second product ~

Animation Shop deserves its own line. It shipped alongside Paint Shop Pro from version 7 onward and it did one job, which was assembling a sequence of frames into an animated GIF with a timing you could set per frame. That single capability is responsible for a very large amount of what the web looked like between 1997 and 2004. Spinning email envelopes, under-construction signs, blinking banner ads and the animated avatar on every forum account were, more often than not, output from this program.

It also had the transition effects and the banner wizard, which is why so many of those artifacts look alike. If you have ever wondered why the text banners on personal pages of that era all seem to fade and scroll in the same five ways, it is because one tool in Minnesota shipped five presets and a few million people used them without changing anything.

~ how a download company got paid ~

The mechanism was thirty days. You downloaded from Jasc's own site or off a Tucows mirror or a cover CD, ran it for a month, and then a nag screen asked for money. Jasc set the price in the tens of dollars against Photoshop in the high hundreds, and shipped a real numbered release most years so the upgrade had something in it. For a home user in 1999 with a scanner and a set of holiday photographs, the gap in capability between the two products was smaller than the gap in price by a wide margin.

This worked well enough that the company never needed the retail channel to survive, which is worth noting because almost every other consumer software company of that size did. Retail meant a distributor, shelf space, returns and a printed box, and it is what killed a long list of publishers when the shelf went away. Jasc had already built its business without it.

~ the sale ~

Corel was the buyer and Corel's own condition explains the deal. Vector Capital had taken Corel private in August 2003 for around 133 million dollars, and the plan was to assemble a consumer graphics portfolio worth floating again. Corel had CorelDRAW on the vector side and Photo-Paint on the raster side, and Photo-Paint was not winning. Buying Jasc bought a raster editor with a real user base and a brand people already trusted, for a price nobody disclosed. Corel went back onto Nasdaq in 2006 at sixteen dollars a share.

The product continued as Corel Paint Shop Pro X in 2005 and is still sold in 2026 under the Corel name. The company did not continue. Corel kept the Minneapolis operation for three years and then closed the Eden Prairie office on 28 November 2007, moving the work elsewhere, and the people who had built the thing over thirteen years went to other employers in the Twin Cities.

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