This Is What’s Happening To Microsoft Paint 

July 24, 2017 was a dark day for digital art.

With the roll out of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, Microsoft announced that the iconic digital drawing program, Paint, was being placed on its “Deprecated” list. That meant that the electronic arts application was no longer “in active development and might be removed in future releases.”

A wave of nostalgia swept across the globe as people mourned the loss of the painting program that let people draw horrible pictures. The beauty of Paint was that you didn’t have to have a fine arts degree to understand the intuitive controls; Paint was simple enough for a toddler to understand. The program’s simplicity also made it an ideal tool for helping novice computer users learn how to use the mouse.

With the advent of touch screens and trackpads, is Paint now obsolete? Not everyone thinks so.

Painters Do More Than Mourn

In the minutes and hours after Microsoft’s announcement, eulogies popped up lamenting the loss of this iconic program.

Not everyone was preparing for the 32-year-old program’s funeral, however. Some marshalled support to keep the application in Windows. Change.org quickly gained more than a dozen “Save MS Paint” petitions.

Microsoft Listens

Before the day was over, Microsoft’s Megan Saunders shared a post to the company’s blog, entitled, “MS Paint fans rejoice: The original art app isn’t going anywhere – except to the Windows Store for free!”

The blogpost let the world know that the pioneering software company had heard the people’s pleas to save Paint:

“Today, we’ve seen an incredible outpouring of support and nostalgia around MS Paint. If there’s anything we learned, it’s that after 32 years, MS Paint has a lot of fans. It’s been amazing to see so much love for our trusty old app. 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.”

In other words, Paint won’t be a default program in future Windows releases, but users can still download the app. Hey, it’s not much, but we’ll take it.

Not All Sunshine and Flowers

The flaw behind Microsoft’s new strategy to move Paint to the Windows Store is that many businesses don’t allow their employees to download applications to their work computers. While you will be perfectly capable of wasting hours of your own time Microsoft Painting at home, you’ll now have to learn to spend idle time on the company’s dime experimenting with Paint 3D (or reading articles on Urbo).

Only time will tell if Paint 3D will live up to the standards set by its predecessor. For the time being, however, we can breathe a sigh of relief.