Paper: the next great iPad app, from the brains behind Courier
Georg Petschnigg throws his hands into the air as he traces thousands of years of human evolution that led us to develop the fragile wrists we need to use tools. Petschnigg locks his wrist into place and pretends to scribble …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days before launch, CNET flagged an unannounced iPad app as the heir to Microsoft's shelved Courier tablet project — and the release confirmed it: Georg Petschnigg, who worked on Courier before Microsoft killed it in 2010, is demonstrating Paper as 'the next great iPad app.' A design concept a major corporation abandoned has been rebuilt as a shipping product by its own alumni.
The pickup was unusually broad for an app launch on day one — CNET, MacStories, MacRumors, Gizmodo UK, BGR and others all covered it within hours — with MacStories framing the debate around Paper's heavy skeuomorphism. It lands in an iPad software market that two years ago was anchored by consumption apps like Instapaper on a device that, per late-2011 measurement, drove 97% of tablet web traffic.
First-order effects
- The ex-Courier team converts a killed internal Microsoft project into a live product competing for the same iPad owners Microsoft never reached, with Petschnigg's wrist-and-tools demo positioning stylus-free drawing as the core interaction.
- Paper enters an iPad App Store where creation tools are still a thin layer over a reading-dominated catalog, giving reviewers like MacStories an immediate frame: is skeuomorphic craft the future of tablet UI?
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's decision to shelve Courier now looks costlier inside its own walls: former staff have proven the demand externally, strengthening the argument that tablet creation software is a category worth owning rather than ceding to Apple's developer ecosystem.
- Other iPad app makers face a raised bar on input feel and visual design — Paper's launch makes hand-tuned drawing physics a differentiator, not just feature lists.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, big-company research labs become talent pipelines for boutique studios: concepts killed at Microsoft, Apple or Google re-emerge as independent products, shifting tablet innovation away from platform owners toward small teams betting on one platform's scale.
- The iPad's role drifts from the consumption device that made Instapaper a hit toward a creation surface — which, given its dominant share of tablet traffic, would pull the whole tablet software economy toward tools rather than readers.
The trend: Tablet computing is pivoting from consumption-first apps toward creation tools, increasingly built by alumni of shelved corporate hardware and software projects betting on the iPad's installed base.