Intellidraw
After the games, I returned to building graphics editors. I
added PostScript style drawing to a Macintosh product called
SuperPaint II while still in college. After graduation, I designed
a next generation drawing program, called Intellidraw for Aldus.
When I realized Intellidraw was destined to be a modest success,
I figured it was time to start my own company.
Pen Computing, FutureWave Software and SmartSketch
At the time, the hot new concept in the personal computing
world was pen computing (you could write on the screen with
an electronic pen rather than using a keyboard). A company
called Go was building an operating system. So in January
of 1993, I convinced Charlie Jackson to invest some money
and we started FutureWave Software to dominate the market
for graphics software on pen computers.
After working on Intellidraw, I knew it was hard for users
to learn complex features and that drawing on a computer was
in many ways slower and more awkward than drawing with pencil
and paper. I imagined drawing with a pen on a computer screen
would be a fantastic improvement. So we set out to build SmartSketch,
software that would make drawing on the computer easier than
drawing on paper. Robert Tatsumi and I wrote code at our homes
and Michelle Welsh handled marketing after her day job.
In the meantime, AT&T bought Go. In January 1994, just
as we were about to ship our product, AT&T pulled the
plug on Go and left us without a market. We did actually make
a few sales of SmartSketch, though. The most noteworthy sale
was to an architect working on Bill Gates' house.
The failure of Go and pen computing was a big setback for
us. The only opportunity we saw was to take our software and
make it run on Windows and the Macintosh. We did it, but now
we were competing against Illustrator and FreeHand. It was
a struggle.
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