Microsoft appears ready to battle leaders such as Adobe Systems and Corel in the market for professional design tools.With its release of a design and illustration application this week, Microsoft appears ready to battle leaders such as Adobe Systems and Corel in the market for professional design tools.
But the verdict from analysts and early beta testers is still out on whether Microsoft Corp.'s software, code-named "Acrylic," will attract defectors from Adobe Systems Inc. and Corel Corp. tools. They say Acrylic has compelling features but has yet to prove itself among the pros.
"When entering a new space, we like to get community feedback," Forest Key, a group product manager in Microsoft's developer division, said about the company's recent release of a free beta of Acrylic.
Click here to read more about Microsoft's public beta of Acrylic.
Acrylic is derived from Expression, an illustration tool that combined painting with raster- and vector-graphic editing features. Expression had been published by Metacreations and Fractal Designs but most recently was owned by the Hong Kong-based Creature House before this company was acquired by Microsoft in 2003.
Since then, Microsoft has made Expression 3.3 available for a free download (to owners of a Microsoft Passport account) in both Windows and Macintosh versions.
Acrylic, on the other hand, is available only for Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2) users. "We haven't announced plans for a Mac version," Key said. He added that Expression 3.3 will remain on Microsoft's site for download, but will be unsupported.
Key characterized Acrylic as a professional artist's tool. But some noted design mavens had mixed reactions to Acrylic's prospects in the professional design market.
"Microsoft has done some pretty impressive work" to make Expression into Acrylic, said Seattle-based author David Blatner, who was also an alpha tester for Acrylic. He noted that Microsoft took a piece of software that had been maintained by one person and put "an actual team behind it."
"In some ways, Acrylic is very compelling," Blatner said, adding that Acrylic includes pixel-based tools like Corel Painter or Adobe Photoshop combined with "painterly, natural-media stuff."
Blatner also said Microsoft added useful tools, such as a red-eye brush, a cloning tool and a panoramic photo-stitcher, and also added Web-centric capabilities such as HTML export.
Asked if he saw Acrylic as a potential head-to-head competitor to Photoshop, Blatner said "not really."
"I don't think Microsoft is even trying to do that," he said, adding that Acrylic complements Photoshop more than it competes with it.
Blatner did say that if Acrylic's final product version is enticing enough, it could lure Mac-based graphic artists into a more cross-platform stance. Acrylic did lure Blatner off of his Mac, he said. "Windows is not nearly as bad as I'd thought it would be," he joked.
"It's interesting to think about why MS is doing this. I don't know why, myself," Blatner said, joking that "the Corel Painter market isn't big enough for them to care about."
Click here to read about Microsoft's "Metro" specification.
But Peter O'Kelly, an analyst with The Burton Group, said the move makes sense.
"It's a logical move for Microsoft; I'm sure some of their customers would rather not have Microsoft defer to Adobe/Macromedia for tools in the creative content designer context," O'Kelly said.
"That certainly is no guarantee of success," O'Kelly added. "It won't be Microsoft's first foray into related domains." As an example, he cited Microsoft's acquisition of Softimage and its subsequent decision to sell the company to Avid Technologies.
But Sandee Cohen, a New York-based artist and author, questioned Acrylic's appeal to the professional artist.
"Expression was a brilliant idea with very limited output," Cohen said. "You had to convert your vector files to TIFF," which ruined the scalability of vector graphics, she added.
Acrylic saves to a proprietary XPR file format but can export to standards such as GIF, JPEG and PDF. But Acrylic has only "limited support for PDF," Key said. It does not support PDF 1.4 or 1.6 transparency, and it rasterizes object layers when exporting.
"The Windows audience may be ripe, because most of them don't use professional-level output like PostScript," Cohen said. But "I want to be able to export my artwork, such as a logo, and send it to someone who might want to resize it." In addition, she said, a rasterized output makes it difficult to support any kind of spot color, which is vital to professional publishing.
"This is why Expression never took off for all these years," Cohen said.
Key maintained that Acrylic still could be used by professionals. "The vast majority of users rasterize their files and then incorporate them into other applications," he said. He added that Microsoft "has had some pro-level graphics tools in the past." He pointed to PhotoDraw and tentatively added Microsoft Paint to the list.
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