Technology, Culture, Commentary on the Internet Revolution

Photoshop Online

by Mike Abundo on March 1st, 2007

First Google Apps, and now this. Pretty soon all software applications will have ad-supported browser-based versions.

Hoping to get a jump on Google and other competitors, Adobe Systems plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months, the company’s chief executive said Tuesday.

The online service is part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET News.com.

“That is new (for Adobe). It’s something we are sensitive to because we are watching folks like Google do it in different categories, and we want to make sure that we are there before they are, in areas of our franchises,” Chizen said.

While Google Apps works mostly with text data that adbots can easily analyze for contextualization, I’m not sure how Adobe will do the same with image data. Some of you might guess tagging, but the biggest incentive for tagging is sharing images, not making them. Then again, since it’s a free version of otherwise expensive software, they might have users choose what kind of ads to see. Let’s see how Adobe solves the problem of ad relevancy.

As anyone who’s used Photoshop will tell you, the power is in the plugins. Adobe should make it easy to develop plugins for this Web-based Photoshop, perhaps through APIs a la Google Apps Premier Edition or custom scripts a la Greasemonkey.

Similarly, Google Sketchup should be a wake-up call to Autodesk. Wonder if they’ll catch the web app wave.

(Via Michael Arrington, who predicts Adobe will kill all online image editing startups.)

Share This

POSTED IN: Adobe, Design, Web 2.0