Microsoft Paint lives on, just not inside Windows 10
Microsoft still loves MS Paint, but it won't be updating it in future.
Microsoft's apparently cold send-off for "trusty old" MS Paint in a widely-reported support note yesterday was misunderstood, according to the company.
Microsoft posted a blog on Monday evening to clarify that MS Paint is merely moving to the Windows Store, rather than being killed off, as had been reported yesterday.
"Amidst today's commentary around MS Paint we wanted to take this opportunity to set the record straight, clear up some confusion and share some good news: MS Paint is here to stay, it will just have a new home soon, in the Windows Store where it will be available for free," wrote Megan Saunders, general manager of Microsoft's 3D for Everyone Initiative for Windows experiences.
Windows 10
That's the first time Microsoft has mentioned Paint moving to its app store since introducing its successor, 3D Paint, in the Windows 10 Creators Update last October.
It's not clear whether Microsoft decided to host the app on the store in response to yesterday's "outpouring of support and nostalgia", or whether that was always the plan. It could have predicted such as response though, given its age and previous estimates that over 100 million people use the software every month.
The change is still a big break in the 32-year history of Paint, which has shipped with the Windows operating system ever since Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in 1985.
As ZDNet reported yesterday, Paint's "deprecated" status didn't mean it was totally dead, but rather that it was "no longer under active development" and that it may be chopped in a future version of Windows.
That's still true, suggesting the Paint app will live on in the Windows Store but won't be getting the attention needed to ensure it's modernized along with new versions of Windows.
And Microsoft is still encouraging more people to use to 3D Paint, which is receiving new feature updates, as it presses ahead with its mixed-reality hardware plans.
"Paint 3D -- the new app for creativity, also available for free with the Windows 10 Creators Update -- will continue to get new feature updates. In addition to the new 3D capabilities, many of the MS Paint features people know and love like photo editing, line and curve tools, and 2D creation are in Paint 3D," wrote Saunders.
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