This and That:  The Final Upgrade
       by Elizabeth B. Wright    October 2005

When do you know you have the final upgrade for your favorite software? Well, one clue is when the company that makes the software no longer exists as an entity from which you have purchased in the past.

Many companies fall into this category. The latest and greatest, for me at least, is JASC. They marketed our nifty Paint Shop Pro photo-handling software. I do not know personally of any other photo-management program that began life user-friendly and stayed that way. It has been so easy to learn its new features from upgrade to upgrade and it has given us more for our money in successive generations than any software I personally know of. However, JASC was bound to be taken over, and Corel did just that. So do I now buy the last PSP upgrade (Version "X" which I assume stands for 10, or could it possibly stand for "ex" as in "this is an extinct product"?) from Corel, or do I throw in the towel at Version 9 from JASC? Since Corel has chosen to overprice the X version, the decision is harder to make. If they are trying to unload the PSP brand name, why not make it more attractive price wise? Only the marketing gurus know the answer to that one.

Some of us went through this drill with WordPerfect. And as most of you know, I consider it to be the Emperor Penguin of word processors. All the rest fall into much lower species categories, such as the Macaroni or the Fairy Penguins. Once again Corel entered the picture, but in this case just in the nick of time. They actually saved WordPerfect from extinction, at least for now.

I have long advocated sticking with what works for you. However, if you upgrade your computer and operating system, you are bound to get caught at some point in the software upgrade whirlpool. However, I am running out of resources for this game. I own too many old versions of software that translates into too much money down the drain and nowhere left in my house to store the accumulated books and CD cases. Donating old programs is not as easy as it sounds. But that is a whole different subject.

Another product upgrade we are already facing is Adobe Photoshop CS2. Just when we thought CS would be the ultimate Photoshop version, along comes an upgrade. What is that all about? I don't even have my copy of CS installed, due to still not having Windows XP on my computer. So do I rush out to buy the version 2 and just bypass the money invested in CS before ever opening the package? No, that will not happen. And why use Photoshop anyway if I'm so crazy about PSP? And by the way, just to add to the confusion, I also use Corel Photo-Paint. Many of you know that the answer lies in the fact that each program has something uniquely good in it and doing a lot of photo work often entails switching between programs for the desired results. Most professionals use only Adobe Photoshop, but since I do not fall into that category, switching around seems to be my modus operandi.

It doesn't look like the perfect operating system is going to evolve in my lifetime. Certainly, Microsoft is only into change, not improvement, and Apple will not run the old DOS- and Windows-based programs in my inventory. In addition, if there is a yet unheard of system being developed out there somewhere, it probably won't stand a chance against Microsoft anyway. The trend right now seems to be in downsizing computer cases while upsizing the capability of the systems, but that still leaves many of us with our dinosaur-sized desktop machines. And we might as well be happy with them, at least for a while. The same may also apply to our software.

Elizabeth Wright is a member of the CCOKC and a regular writer for the eMonitor