Xara is an international software company founded in 1981, with an HQ in Berlin and development office in Hemel Hempstead, UK.

However, the potential of Acorn's RISC processor was acknowledged, raising hopes of "a tidy, all-in-one, expandable, fast, large memory RISC-based micro for around the £1000 mark".

ArtWorks, the predecessor to Xara Xtreme, was released on the Archimedes,[2] having been announced early in the life of the machine as an "object-orientated drawing package, similar to MacDraw in many respects".

[7] By the mid-1990s, the company had determined that the size of the Acorn market was not large enough to provide the revenues needed to invest in developing "the best new programs", and that the tools available for Windows (C++ compilers and class libraries) facilitating development of such new products were not likely to become available for the RISC OS platform, despite the company encouraging Acorn and others to provide them.

[12] Another hardware product that was planned but not apparently realised in its original form was a laser printer card for IBM PC-compatible machines, employing Acorn's ARM chipset and Computer Concepts' own PostScript clone.

[15]: 3  Fax and printer cards both subsequently featured in Computer Concepts' Archimedes-based product line as the FaxPack and LaserDirect, respectively.

Ultimately, RISC OS incorporated fixes resolving the reported problems, and an improved product was resubmitted for approval and readied for eventual relaunch.

The company had been making MPEG-based video boards for Acorn's Online Media division, and the takeover was therefore regarded as a "progressional" development for both parties.

This involved a team of 20+ developers, who worked for more than two years to produce a competitor to then market-leading drawing software CorelDRAW.