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.
I also remember Quark Express.
Somehow Adobe ran them out of business or at least trying to compete with them.
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.
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.
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.
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.