Microsoft PhotoDraw

» see microsoft.com/photodraw as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

photodraw lived in the office 2000 premium box. that was not the office 2000 that ended up on most turkish machines around 1999 or 2000. our installs of office at home and at the internet cafe were the regular ones, the ones that fit on the cd we actually had. premium and developer editions were enterprise sku territory in tr, and they came with an image editor most people never saw.

the product itself was an odd middle. raster and vector in one canvas, which sounds reasonable today but in 1999 meant losing both fights at once. it was not photoshop on photo work, and it was not illustrator on vector work. microsoft pitched it at small business owners making flyers and web banners, which was a real audience, just one that mostly used the simpler tools in publisher or word.

two versions shipped in the same year: photodraw 2000 in june 1999, then photodraw 2000 v2 in october. development stopped after that.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

photodraw used a layered canvas where each shape or photo was a separate object you could drag around without flattening. it had templates for business cards and web buttons, plus a library of clip art and stock photos shared with the rest of office. the file format was.mix, which is now in the same readable-by-nothing tier as old wordperfect and lotus formats.

~ the early days ~

for about eighteen months photodraw had a small but real following inside corporate environments that already had office 2000 premium site licenses. trainers wrote books about it. microsoft press shipped step by step photodraw 2000 in 1999. there was even a hint that it might absorb publisher in a future version of office, since both products were aimed at the same flyer-and-newsletter audience.

~ the fall ~

by the time office xp arrived in may 2001, microsoft had decided that photodraw was not a fight worth picking. office xp shipped without it. small business image editing got handed off to publisher and to the picture manager that arrived in office 2003. the design tools work eventually surfaced in the microsoft expression line, which itself died a few years later.

~ what really happened ~

there was no shutdown announcement. photodraw was simply not in the next version of office, the.mix format was not opened by anything else, and the standalone retail boxes stopped showing up on shelves. extended support officially ended on 14 july 2009, but the cultural death was the may 2001 office xp launch.

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