Live Picture: Software that was way ahead of its time

Or is it 'should have killed Photoshop'...

The problem is no open source (or even closed) come even close to the Photoshop workflow, and also integration with other monopolized software like Illustrator and Fireworks. It's also one of the reasons why a lot of people can't switch to Linux, winin' it is just not good enough

A monopoly can also be seen as, a pioneer making something useful, others being unable to replicate or challenge with their own.

take gimp for example, it is nowhere near the dominance of adobe. its like windows-macintosh of the computer graphics world.

1) Your site's burning, pitty most people won't see your article/images.

2) The claim to "unlimited everything" repeated numerously in the article as well as "instant" anything is just hyperbole. There's no such thing in software. It might've been cleverer than photoshop about things, but unlimited and instant? No.

3) The claim to complete resolution independence is false. You might store editing operations/layers as parameters, but the source material is still resolution bound.

4) 48-bits is not that great honestly. At RGB (no word about alpha) that's 16-bit per channel. If it's normalized that's 64k graduations vs. 256 graduations. If interpreted as half float you'll only get 2 bits more per channel (half-floats use a 10-bit significand). That's cool, but not all that cool, either you get a non HDR format with a cool channel resolution, or you'll get a HDR format with 4x more graduations than 8-bpc. No you know what's cool? 32-bit single precision floats. 4 bytes, 32-bits per channel, 128-bit per pixel. You'll get 23 bits in graduations and HDR. Desktop graphics cards use this format internally anyway.

The article praises Live Picture, but offer no hints as to why it failed to "kill" or even simply concurrence Photoshop.