CorelDRAW 11:
Baseliner or Serve and Volleyer?
What kind of personality and attitude
should a software program have today?
I have just returned home from attending the Siebel Open, the annual San Jose stop of the men’s professional tennis tour. As regular readers of this space know, my love for graphics and publishing is eclipsed by only a few things, one of them being a love of sport, tennis in particular. Therefore, it is second nature for me to look at tennis and see metaphors for life. On this particular day, I saw metaphors for CorelDRAW...
The matches were wonderful. Lleyton Hewitt, the No. 1 player in the world today, was facing Jan-Michael Gambill, also ranked in the top 20 in the world. Gambill’s most significant claim to fame is the regular position he holds in People magazine’s Sexiest Men on Earth; he’s a pretty decent tennis player, too, with a huge serve and punishing volleys.
His opponent, Hewitt, is also responsible for the heart-skipping of many girls and young women, but his undeniable claim to fame is how well he returns big serves, gets to any ball anywhere on the court, and hits winning passing shots.
So you can see that this match-up promised to be delicious: big server against great returner; one who likes to advance to the net pitted against one who tries to hit balls past people at the net.
“Have you ever thought about what it would be like if software programs had personalities like these guys?” one of my companions asked.
“Pete Sampras would be like Windows or Microsoft Office,” I answered. “A big serve and huge forehand that crushes anyone or anything that gets in the way.
“And Andre Agassi is like Adobe Acrobat,” I continued, saying both names slowly to let the alliteration sink in (An-dre is to Ado-be as A-ga-ssi is to Ac-ro-bat...okay, forget that I brought that up...). “A versatile player who can do just about anything in a given situation.”
My friend didn’t know of CorelDRAW past hearing me talk about it, so I had to go it alone for the rest of the analogy. What kind of a tennis player is DRAW, I wondered to myself, and what new tennis skills should version 11 display?
As I wondered about this, Hewitt was beginning to impose his game upon Gambill. The only way Gambill could secure points was to blast outright service aces past Hewitt—anything less would allow Hewitt into the point, and inevitably, he would seize the advantage with his array of shots and retrieving skills. He didn’t have the biggest serve or the most ferocious overhead, or the hardest forehand, or the most adept volley. But the weight of his confidence and his tenacity wore down Gambill, as it has just about every other player in the game today. It was so difficult to find any bugs, er, weaknesses in his game.
Why can’t DRAW be like that? Maybe it already is like that, but nobody knows it yet. (And of course, if nobody knows it yet, then it isn’t so, because the perception of something being true often is more important than the reality. If a tree falls in a forest...)
It’s not terribly difficult to understand why CorelDRAW isn’t seen that way today. In its heyday, back in 1993, ’94, and ’95, DRAW was marketed as the big serve-and-volleyer—the product with BLOCKBUSTER features. Who cares if it had a few bugs in it; it could do Amazing Features A, B, and C, and that made it worthy of all things wonderful. And besides, you could buy it at Egghead Software for $99, so you’d better go get your copy today.
Overlooked in the fog of extrusions and fountain-filled text was the fact that DRAW versions 3, 4, and 5 were among the most versatile programs on the market then. (Granted, it’s hard to regard DRAW 4 as anything other than an abject failure, but that was due to its bugs, not its features.) The Mike Cowpland marketing machine never saw fit to advertise DRAW’s amazing import and export skills, or the ease with which it created blends, its unparalleled tools for managing and creating objects, or its deftness with imported bitmaps. They weren’t sexy enough. They were the graphical equivalent of the baseliner, not the big, exciting serve-and-volleyer.
Today, Corel’s development approach is not at the mercy of the company’s advertising philosophy. (In fact, the company’s product marketing is virtually nonexistent, but that’s for another column.) So perhaps it’s time for CorelDRAW to change the way it plays tennis. Starting with DRAW 11, it’s time for the product to be thought of as the Lleyton Hewitt, or the Andre Agassi, of graphic software. The graphic tool that has an answer for anything that you throw at it. A toolchest so rich that you just can’t get a ball past it. And it just never seems to break down.
The irony of this situation is obvious: CorelDRAW is practically like that already...except for the breaking down part. Name another program with the breadth of skills that DRAW has, and I’ll probably call you a liar. Name a program that can adapt to user preferences the way that DRAW does and I’ll buy it. Name a program that combines DRAW’s speed and economy of motion and effort and I’ll laugh out loud.
Unfortunately, name a handful of people, outside of the Corel bubble, who recognize these as DRAW’s core strengths and I’ll be amazed. DRAW’s legacy is its tendency to go for the big serve, the crushing volley, and hope that it doesn’t get tripped up by an unforced error.
In the middle of the second set, Gambill had Hewitt on the run. Hewitt stretched all the way to the edge of the court to run down one shot and was now running to the other side, expecting Gambill to hit it there. Instead, Gambill drilled a backhand down the middle, right at Hewitt, who was running so hard he couldn’t stop to set up for the shot. Instead, he jumped in the air, took his racquet behind his back, and swung between his legs at the ball that was scoring a field goal between his knees. Gambill was so surprised that the ball was actually coming back, he didn’t do enough with his next shot, volleying it softly back. Hewitt pounced on the short ball, drilled a winner, and the crowd became delirious.
I can come up with many parallels to that act of tennis heroism. The other day, a client had lost the original file for an important project; all she had was a PDF proof of it. CorelDRAW to the rescue: it imported the PDF file, converted all elements to editable objects, and she was back in business. Last week, another client had created .eps files from Freehand that Microsoft Word refused to import. But DRAW was able to import them, and once there, the .eps files that it created flowed into Word incident-free. And last month, DRAW’s scripting tool reduced a week-long formatting job down to about 90 minutes.
CorelDRAW doesn’t need a bunch of new features; it needs a new on-court personality. It needs to be seen as the swiss-army knife for the graphics community. It deserves to be thought of as the ultimate problem-solver, the one that has an answer for just about anything.
Not that I’m trying to make life too easy for Program Manager Tony Severenuk, but DRAW possesses most of those qualities already.
This is a question of perception more than it is reality...