Interesting how they have kept MS-Paint as simple as Notepad for three decades, when they could have 'embraced, extended and extinguished' every photo editing application known to man during this time.

This could have been done like a classic OS calculator, with simple/scientific/financial UI variants, with simple/artworker/programmer modes. Programmer mode would be like the image processing toolkit VIPS (or Imagemagick), where you could batch process images without opening them, or, as per the article, rotate a 10K x 10K image by 0.02 degrees around any given x/y origin. Presumably 'artworker' mode would be somewhere between Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop, with 'simple' being the MS-Paint that grandma can use to crop undesirables out of family photos.

Admittedly, this is not what an Operating System is about, however, over the years Microsoft have acquired and relinquished many a graphics application, including Softimage 3D and the Seadragon infinite zoom image viewer. It is almost as if they don't care.