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Adobe Intends To Move All of Its Applications Online
E1ven writes "Adobe has announced their intention to transition their entire suite of software to web-based applications This includes their popular offerings Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects. '[Adobe Chief Executive Bruce] Chizen answered a question about whether a complete shift to Web delivery would take five or 10 years and he indicated it would be closer to a decade. Like many traditional software makers including Microsoft Corp., Adobe must fend off rivals delivering competing applications over the Web and it also needs to adopt a new business model after years of selling software in boxes. Chizen expects professional customers of products like Acrobat document-sharing or Photoshop for editing images would opt to pay for subscriptions versus facing a steady stream of advertising to use tools critical to their jobs.'"
I have no intentions of granting adobe access to anything I work on. I'm almost done getting off adobe products, I just need to find a good reader alternative for pdf on windows.
>Adobe has announced their intention to *move*
Fixed it again. Next person that says transition gets a poke in the eye.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Good luck with that. I'd love to see how you're going to implement full-blown, resource-heavy photo editing in a browser.
And I don't really see any competitors offering online photo editing on the level of Photoshop... there's probably a reason for that.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
Do they plan to move it to web-based applications as in, say, Google Maps, or to Flash/some other proprietary technology?
I haven't found any software that takes longer to load than Adobe's. Now they're going to narrow the bottleneck by putting it online? Great idea...
..if java makes some huge leaps in the next 10 years then maybe... a lot of things can happen in 10 years in this business...
However, what about days like yesterday. We had a line of thunderstorms with high straight line winds that snapped a few of the poles around my house. I was without DSL most of the day. Since I still had power, I could work offline with Photoshop CS and still productive. If the application was online, yesterday would have been a bust. Or I would have been driving around town on my laptop (a 1.25Ghz G4 Powerbook with 512MB of ram, getting a new MBP when 10.5 ships), which might run the application. (Hopefully it will be FF friendly. I keep a Windows based machine around because sometimes....)
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I think it's about time to coin a new term; Googlation: n, the virtual necessity and eventual realization of migrating every single desktop application to the web.
Taking into accout how expensive Photoshop is, I wonder if this is a move to avoid software piracy (or at least mitigate it). Besides, anyone willing to pay for a full Photoshop license will also be buying a machine according to its needs; I just don't see how it can work (will it be a JS application? Flash? Not-hellishly-slow? Will it run remotely or locally? How well will it behave when treating large images? And so on).
My 0.02 cents
I am so glad I convinced the company to run away from Adobe a year ago.
Aftereffects and premiere as a web app? Oh my god those will suck horribly.
And for Photoshop.... if there was a single event that will thrust Gimp further foreward in the world... this would be it.
"Edit that graphic! we go to press in an hour!"
or
"Edit that commercial! we need it to go to air in the morning"
with the response.....
"I cant, internet is down."
Oh yeah, That will go over like a lead balloon. Adobe is trying to remove themselves from being a choice for professional use?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Photoshop is such a bloated pig of software, even on a fast dual-core computer with 2 gig of ram.
And you want to run this as an ajax-ified web application to edit 50 megabyte images? Good luck.
If they continue down this road it will be the end of photoshop as a graphics standard.
There's one area where I can immediately see a benefit for Adobe in doing something like this--license compliance. By allowing each shop to set up an in-house appserver/webserver for their programs, they can ensure that only X number of licensed copies are run at a time. Benefit for Adobe - huge. Benefit for the shops - not so much.
This guy's the limit!
But I don't like the trend of *everything* moving to a web based structure. Given the dire effects I've seen as a result of unfinished network applications and stacks getting plugged into a corporate network by accident, I darn sure don't want to have to keep a box (regardless of how well firewalled stuff is) plugged in to do development.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
in 10 years, the 'web' won't be around, I would guess. something else might, but it seems that the current model is not going to 'scale' very much more than it is now. throwing more speed at it won't solve it, either.
10 years is a LONG time in tech. I fully expect things to be quite different, online-wise, than they are now.
adobe makes a laughing stock of themselves when they try to predict more than 6mos to a year out. wow. amazing that anyone would take a 10yr tech prediction SERIOUSLY!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It's minimalist, but I find SumatraPDF useful:
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
How in the hell do they plan on doing this?
First off, Adobe, try making your apps, 64bit first!
AND
How in the hell are you going to manage PSD's that take 4 gigs of ram? How are you going to manage PSD's when they take 8 gigs? (64bit)
I cant for the life of me why figure out why they want to put it online. It is not going to perform better. It will be SLOWER.
A friend of mine that works with me in the industry mentioned that Adobe was planning on doing this. He told me over a year ago... and i couldnt imagine why they would.
There is just no point to it... other than copy protection.
I think what will happen, is that there will be an online ad supported version of photoshop that is basic, so that it can compete with others. BUT NO FUCKING PROFESSIONAL, in any 3d animation studio, photog studio, design, print etc.. will want to do their work online over the net like that. It's dumb, and will be slower than the existing standard.
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We currently live in a world where for some time, local hard disk capacity and processing power have been growing far, far, faster than bandwidth.
Adobe makes applications which work with huge amounts of data and often
require significant processing power to do it. Obviously, the right thing to do is to take these applications and make them limited by bandwidth rather than local resources.
F'ing genius.
A legitimate copy of the last desktop version of Photoshop,etc is going to be like gold to publishers. Piracy of that last version is going to make Windows piracy look like a drop in the bucket.
Where will Windows be in ten years? Where will Linux be? What about Mac? Who knows. If applications are web based then it doesn't matter if you bet on the wrong horse or not.
It is going to hit EVERY software company sooner or later.
The main cause of this problem is Microsoft and Windows. The good thing is it is going to hit Microsoft just as hard as every one else.
Every program can only get to be so good and so feature rich. Eventually it becomes a waste to buy the "new version" Many people felt that way with Office 2000 and even more with Office 2003. Same thing will happen with Photoshop, Flash, and Dreamweaver. That and it looks like we are stuck with Windows forever at this point. So people are not buying new versions when they buy a new OS. Microsoft knows that if they break backward computability people will scream. And they do scream. So how do companies make money? The stop selling software and rent it.
Some software is immune to this. Tax software is always going to be great income stream since you have to get a new version every year.
Games because people will always want new games.
But the key thing is that software just doesn't wear out.
I know that the FOSS zealots will start screaming for joy at this but then you have the other problem. The FOSS model doesn't yet provide the same quality in every market as Closed Source does. GIMP is not as good as Photoshop CS btw my wife Loves GIMP and uses it all the time. She does think it is better than Photoshop Elements. OpenOffice is not as good as Office " I do think it is good enough for most people". There no FOSS replacment for Solidworks, ProE, or even TurboCad.
So the industry is has a problem. How do you stay in business? I think the renting of applications is a really BAD solution.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I can see moving office apps online but frickin' photoshop, the filler of hard drives, the slayer of CPU's, the buggerer of RAM, the biggest system hog that isn't a video game or vista?
Ok, I'm assuming that they're going to do some sort of progressive display thing like Google does for Earth and the megapixel images in Earth, only rendering on screen what's necessary for you to see, but wouldn't that surely suck for the artists?
But I suppose I know why Adobe wants to do this. When was the last time you heard of someone pirating a World of Warcraft account? If Photoshop is a software service, it will be far, far more difficult to pirate, and at $800 a pop, too expensive to own.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Riiiiight...
Opening and editing several GB of files at a time over a network? Any network.
Yeah... sure. If you don't really need to have it done in like... this century.
And if they somehow do manage to strip down the bloated (but powerful) monster Adobe apps have become - why the hell use it online if you can get that to work @home?
And say that they develop some kind of server backed-up solution where for those huge files you get to use their super-secret-super-powerful server farm - wouldn't most of the menial tasks (open, crop, do little photo-editing) just jam that system?
We are very sorry for the inconvenience, but your multimillion dollar marketing campaign will have to wait for the resources to become available - millions of users are currently adding text to the photos of cats.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Add "Web 2.0" to a press release and the idiot press runs it uncritically?!? One can already buy and download Adobe applications from the Adobe site. The applications let users know when an upgrade is available, it then downloads and install said upgrade. I stopped using Adobe's products when they started treating me like a pirate with their online product registration.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. --Denis Diderot
Has anyone thought of the implications this has on piracy? In web-based apps the software is never even on your computer; your computer is just acting like a terminal taking your input and sending output to Adobe's server, where all the work is done. If you don't have a legitimate account, you don't get access to the server. It doesn't seem like there's any way to pirate this. Which could be good or bad, depending on if you're an exec at Adobe or just a run-of-the-mill peasant.
Seriously? You really expect a graphic artist or video producer to pull up a webbrowser to do their work? Could you imagine the clunky control scheme of trying to edit HD video inside of Internet Explorer (Shuddrs). What about Adobe Encore, with DVD and BluRay authoring? Please tell me I am not going to have to actually upload uncompressed HD video to Adobe to be able to use it? What about the 1 gig graphic file I am working on for a billboard? Ugh!
However, there is something I have to smirk at. Lets make Dreamweaver, Flash and Shockwave webbased! Yes, I am going to go to a website to design my website!
adobes apps are already online... have you checked bit torrent trackers recently?
Adobe has saturated the market with Photoshop. Random people refer to editing software as photoshopping, even if they aren't using Photoshop. There also comes a point where software that costs a few thousand dollars is "good enough" and the interface becomes "different enough" that professionals don't have to purchase updates.
So what is Adobe to do in the long-run to secure high-levels of revenue?
Convert something you buy into something that you lease forever. Then it doesn't matter what the added value for updates is.
Except of course that doesn't mean that they're providing any value for us, the user. Maybe I don't want to pay more over the course of my career for software than I do already. So why should I play ball?
All Adobe's products are ALREADY online... Bittorrent, Kazaa, edonkey...
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
Does anyone actually want this? Seriously, this is another case of a product without a market. I daresay that no one wants to rent their software. Unfortunately we have a situation where a giant in the market is telling people how to do things. We've seen so many failed companies in the software industry for this reason. People will just keep using CS3 until the end of time if need be. Since Mac Pros are built like a tank, they will last forever too. So there's a perfect combination. I mean there are actually companies out there still using DOS based computer systems. The same thing will happen to the graphics industry if this comes to pass. Oh and the "old" solution will be much faster than any web based Cthulhulian nightmare that Adobe will conjure up. Now if they truly end up offering the full power suite for free online, even with ads, then maybe it will catch on. But only if it can outperform a CS3/MacPro combo. It's free to stay with the old software too.
I have a quick powerful laptop/desktop in front of me and I'm going to slow everything down by going on line? Maybe if they mean using Google Gears to move logic to a browser, but I really don't need to move most apps I use for work from my computer to the web.
As with other transitions to Web based, what about people like me who do a lot of stuff while commuting or otherwise not attached to the Mother Ship?
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Not much to add, some people should just get their head out of their asses and look around a little more often. What we need is apps that we can run everywhere, with near-unlimited storage and no network need. If I'm on location in the death valley, or in some isolated location and I need to put together a rought cut of footage that we just shot, I don't want to depend on a internet connection. AfterEffects barely runs up to speed on today's laptops, make it go faster not slower. I'm sorry, I love Adobe products but this is simply stupid.
Can you imagine printing a large 300 DPI image, over the internet.
It takes forever on gigabit LAN.
Not to mention the bandwidth charges Adobe would be facing.
Nah, this is BS, can't happen.....bring out the gimp.
I remember when MOD was an audio format, and DOS wasn't a network attack....
10 years? The internet will be a footnote in history by then.
threadeds blog
Lots of people are sitting at computers they paid $1000+ for, with, say, a 1 gigahertz Celery and 256 MB of RAM.
Now, that's worth, what, $70 on the market?
But that's not the psychology. The truth, that a computer is a durable good, is trumped by the psychology, which is that it only works for, say, 5 years. "it's not really a durable good -- it's become 'obsolete' and as soon as the what's available catches up I'll spend another $1000 to get one that isn't broken".
So here's what Adobe wants to sell you (as well as Google, etc, in terms of onlines services):
"Nononono, your computer actually ISN'T broken -- it's still a $1000 computer. Only instead of spending your $1000 set aside to catch up with a new computer, as some people do, you can spend it on a service, keeping all your documents and settings etc. In fact, it won't even cost you $1000! You'll get MORE than the people buying a $1000 new computer, since their new one doesn't come with Adobe (etc) software."
I know I'll probably get mod'd down for this, so I'm posting anon, since Slashdot doesn't do pricing psychology, but it's true. There's something inherently, totally $1000 about a computer that had been $1000 a few years ago, and if it's "broken" (obsolete) you can "fix" it and people would be like, whoa, $500 is totally worth it to fix a $1000 computer for the next five years, since the alternative is paying the full $1000 or using something that's broken.
I no longer use Acrobat reader given its massive clunkiness. Foxit is much better with one odd exception. OLE embedding in MS Office docs is not handled the same way as Acrobat so embedded PDFs are always opened by Adobe not Foxit.
Hardware gets faster and faster, and the manufacturers push consumers to buy it whether they need it or not, leaving lots of spare resources for Microsoft's crummy OSes to gobble up... and now it turns out we won't be doing any processor work locally anyway- it's all to be farmed out to some remote server on the web. Your brand new 128-core Intel Spankium 99 with 2TB RAM is reduced to nothing more than a glorified dumb terminal. What's the point in all this amazing hardware if we are only to use a fraction of its potential?
[oblig car analogy] It's like manufacturing fuel-guzzling road cars capable of doing 140 miles per hour when the speed limit means you shouldn't do more than 70 and the rush hour traffic means you rarely get above 20. How stupid would that be? Oh, wait...
And how much is this going to cost Adobe in bandwidth and server costs? I mean it's one thing to run a word processor remotely, but Photoshop?
I'm currently working in AfterEffects in another window, compositing 10-bit CGI with stereoscopic HD video -- that's 2 x 1920x1080 pixels just for the raw footage, 29.97 times per second, plus effects precomps, plus stereo CGI elements.
...Still waiting for that preview...
I'm doing this on a hellafast workstation, yet I've been spending most of my morning surfing the net and sucking coffee while Adobe's bitch chomps through my frames to deliver low-res previews.
And Adobe thinks I'm going to add Interweb pipes into the equation?
Fuck them. Fuck them right in the arse. Unless I've got an iQuantum Computing Array and triply redundant mega-speed net access, this will never, ever fly. It would require such a profound and concerted shift of technological paradigms that "ten years" as a prediction sounds positively mentally retarded.
I fart in the general direction of Adobe, and scoff at this forecast as the hype-ballyhooed pile of steaming malarkey it truly, truly is.
These stories are free but worth money.
First, let me say that in contrast to many people here, I actually like Adobe's products. I have been using Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat since version 4. I do agree that Illustrator takes a while to launch (even on fast machines), but other than that, I have no complaints. In fact, of all large software I've used, I find Adobe's to be the most stable, feature-rich and easy to use.
I will not, however, move to an online subscription-based app, and I'm sure many other design professionals will agree. Adobe's core users will force them to offer a desktop version. There are just too many cons to using an online app:
1) What if you are working in an area with no broadband access - or even no access at all?
2) What if your ISP or local hardware is down?
3) What kind of servers will they need to have in place to support thousands of users simultaneously editing large graphics?
4) What about privacy?
5) What about security for companies working on secret projects?
Those are just a few things that come to mind immediately, and I'm sure there are more.
Even if broadband is uber-fast in 10 years (which I doubt considering the infrastructure needed to be improved upon), there will be more things than ever competing for that data speed. Will I be able to stream an HD movie for my kids to watch while I work on a 500MB tradeshow graphic for my company? I bet not - even if my ISP tripled their speed to 10Mb. And even at 50Mb, it is WAY faster to open that 500MB file from a local disk than upload it to a server somewhere.
I'm sure we'll have a local-run app for decades to come.
People who say "money does not buy happiness" are just people without money trying to make themselves feel better.
"Adobe today filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after a shocking decline in sales following adoption of a web-based business model..."
This sounds completely insane to me, as a user of the full goddamn creative suite for everything I do. But then again, he said ten years... And who knows what things will be like then. Maybe web-based applications will be as-- or even more --practical compared to today's norms.
But I don't get the part about Adobe fending off competitors... WHAT. COMPETITION. DOES. ADOBE. HAVE? Macromedia was the closest thing they had to a competitor...and now it's ADOBE Flash.
I like FOSS solutions, or even just cheaper closed source stuff, as much as the next geek... But name one application that is a direct replacement for everything that any given Adobe application has. (Excluding, perhaps, Acrobat Reader)
You can't. Hey, the GIMP is great, but it's no Photoshop. Close only counts in horseshoes and global thermo-nuclear war. Just like blender is no replacement for say...Lightwave 3D. They're still great apps, but they don't do it.
Am I missing something? Is there a company out there producing stuff that is EXACTLY like all the stuff in the Adobe Creative Suite?!
Anyway, that's my morning rant. Don't flame me too hard, I haven't had my morning caffeination yet.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
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Aside from being able to say "Sure, all our apps are online..." "Oh, yeah, we're web 2.0"
Which smacks of "Are you going to make it all 220? Yeah, 220, 221... whatever it takes..."
Is there something horribly lacking in Photoshop (even the good ol' 5.0 core) that is screaming for whatever imagined improvements would come from being an online app?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Are the apps really going to be on line or are they going to be something like an active X control that does all the work off line.
I can't see adobe ponying up for all that server power just so that they can stop people ripping off their software.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Seriously...? The practicalities of sending huge amounts of document data over a network for "realtime" use are just laughable, so I don't believe for one moment this is intended, clearly your data is staying locally, it's your executable coming over the wire. It lives on your machine and updates like a virus checker, won't run unless it authenticates every time you open it. That's not dissimilar to what these Apps do already.
No, this announcement has nothing to do with competitors or technology. This is a marketing announcement, to sow the seeds for generating more revenue for those lucky shareholders. This is a pre-cursor to subscription based computing/software. This is all about greed. Adobe are already greedy, their software prices are very high, they have a history of stiffing their customers ( Photoshop CS3 is up to 2x the price in the UK over the US version ).
Think about it. Adobe release a new Photoshop every, say 18 months? Every 18 months, the faithful devotees buy the upgrade, new users buy the software, and the feckless steal it. The money comes in, at least from the first two. If Adobe takes longer to develop, say 2 years, that's another 6 months before the money comes in. Now... if us suckers are paying monthly, and they don't release.... well, what difference does it make? Adobe still gets paid... hell, they can take as long as they like now, slash the development budget, they have a constant revenue stream, why innovate? If they take 3 years, well so what, it just means that the customer has paid twice as much for the older version. It's simple arithmetic.
Subscription based software isn't about making it easier to innovate ( which is what they will claim ), it's about removing the requirement to innovate.
Why is this not a Good Thing? Yes, current ISP bandwidth issues are an issue, but moving forward, bandwidth will increase. Assuming Adobe doesn't do something stupid like use Silverlight or other proprietary Web technologies that might lock into one vendor's browser (IE), this move would make all the Big Apps Linux would-be-users complain about not having available to any platform. ...And web-based app technologies will only improve with time, as developers figure out how to optimize caching of code and other asynchronous application coding techniques.
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Jeeze,
I don't understand this whole screed of comment about "what if my internet goes down - I wont be able to work", "It'll be slow to load", "I can't see how they'll implement Photoshop in Flash and make is nice" and all the rest.
They guy said 10 years, 10 YEARS!!! That's a lifetime in IT. Online delivery of applications will be a WHOLE DIFFERENT BALL GAME then. I doubt very much Photoshop will be any different to how it is now, but it will be delivered via the Web. It will not doubt be possible to run it in offline mode and all sorts (perhaps for several days at a time) without having to check back with Adobe HQ.
I don't use Adobe stuff anyway (I'm a Linux bod) but I don't really see a problem with what they are suggesting. You just have to have a little bit of imagination as to how it will roll out in a decade from now.
Its about getting $. Its much harder to gain access to a server then to get cracked serial numbers for the actual versions of Adobe products. Seriously, Flash and Photoshop serial numbers are floating around the web waiting for anyone to get them, I'm sure that this is just Adobe's way of getting their money for those products by either a subscription based service, a one time fee or through ads. Or it could be a way to make easy cross-platform products without open-sourcing them.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
They probably want to do it because of software piracy. I'm pretty sure their software is listed in a lot of the cheap software spams I used to see in my inbox years ago. Maybe by requiring a login to use the software you've paid for, they'll prevent people from pirating it. This would basically be doing the opposite of the music industry which has been making moves toward fewer restrictions (more DRM-less music sales) where the software industry is trying to move in the opposite direction, just years later than the music industry originally went down the same path.
If fewer people end up buying the software from it running slower, the only people that will be able to afford it and use it will be those that have a lot of money, or who are too comfortable to switch to an alternative. As they lose sales, their price will have to go up to compensate to maintain revenue. We've seen other companies go down this same path, such as AOL, Sun, and IBM. All of these companies have tried various things to change, IBM is the only one that has been halfway successful.
Look, could you just be honest, Adobe? Acknowledge that you want to trap customers into paying eternally for your products, gaining millions of dollars over the life cycle of your products in the market, and move on. Don't feed garbage about "what customers want". Find me a customer who wants to pay for the rest of his life for a software product instead of paying once, and I'll show you either a sado-masochist or a paid advertisement.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
So maybe that's their plan? If I'm a filthy rich executive of a software company that has damn-near complete market saturation, what does the future of my company look like? Innovation is hard and costs a lot of money, and once you've put out a "good-enough-can't-complain-too-much" product, the urge to upgrade to the next release is minimized or eliminated altogether. (See Microsoft's problem: Windows XP falls into the good-enough-can't-complain-too-much category, and folks are rejecting Vista in epic numbers.)
So what do you do? You tell your customers that you're going to make their lives miserable 5 to 10 years from now. You tell them, "This is the last version of this program that will work the way you've expected it to for the last 20 years. From now on, it will be a slower, more frustrating experience that will only be available according to the whim of your internet service provider."
Then you watch the sudden influx of new orders and upgrades as people and firms interested in a legal copy of the software throw more money at you than ever before. Because, as noted, this last desktop version will like gold.
Flush with previously unknown levels of cash, you leave the company with an unbelievably fat retirement pension, gracioiusly given by the Board of Directors because you've been such a financial genius, and retire to that nice island in the South Pacific that you've always enjoyed visiting but, until now, did not have the resources to purchase.
Damn. Is Adobe hiring?
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Preferably on a quad core mac pro. It loads fast! Even on my dual 867 MHz G4, it loads pretty fast. But I agree that putting it on the web isn't a good idea.
I want my bits, on my box, in my house, available when I want them.
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It's already very hard to me to use any CS Photoshop [I stayed in 7] because of RAM. Now I'll have to worry about my RAM and my bandwidth.
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.
I tried Sumatra for about 3 months and found it nice and quick, but had issues opening some files and had printing problems where it would cut off the right side of the page. YMMV.
I switched to Foxit Reader and have not had the same issues since.
Sa-Yo-O-Na-Ra.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
...for me to learn to love Gimp...
dB Masters
Maybe he's talking about a service like Steam. You know, online *delivery* of *applications*, which then run locally on your PC, complete with pretty-good copy protection systems and a subscription-based approach to "ownership". Makes sense to me... what's so special about retail boxes for software anyway?
I'll buy that, IF the subscription fee includes a 100x upgrade to my broadband connection speed.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I doubt very much Photoshop will be any different to how it is now, but it will be delivered via the Web.
You mean like Gimp is? Like Adobe Acrobat is? Like every open source app and half the new proprietary apps out there are?
If they were just talking about online DELIVERY they could do it now. They wouldn't HAVE to wait ten years or even five.
They will have a local application that can be pirated, given away, distributed by bittorrents, etc... , but key functionality will be service model...
I was planning to get all of my Adobe applications online as well!
Adobe has real problems, then. Here's the bio of their CEO, Bruce Chizen. Mattel Electronics merchandising. Microsoft eastern region sales manager. VP sales of Claris (remember Claris?). Zero background in any industry that uses Adobe graphics products.
He's identified the marketing problem: "These products are designed to appeal to a younger generation of Internet users for whom paying $400 for a packaged software product is a thing of the past." That's reasonable enough. The going rate for a photo editing program is somewhere below $99. Adobe Photoshop Elements is at $99, it does most of what most people want to do, and people buy it at retail. Adobe's problem there was that they thought they could raise the price of Photoshop from year to year, and that didn't work. The price trend for software is down, not up.
Since they acquired Macromedia, the Macromedia products have gone downhill. Dreamweaver 8 and later are horrid; Adobe can't get FTP to work reliably, create HTML that will pass validation, or make the view in Dreamweaver match the view in the browser. The newer versions are notably worse than the old ones. I just hope they don't break the Flash player engine, which is an elegant and delicate little piece of software. That thing does more in 2MB of code than most programs today do in 200MB.
On the video side, Adobe's problem is that the low end has been taken over by tools that come free with Macs and cameras, while the high end has been taken over by tools from high-end players like Avid. Premiere was once considered a high-end tool; now it's a low end tool with a high end price. Not good.
Open source isn't helping that much here. There's still no good open source replacement for Dreamweaver. Nvu, which had real promise, was abandoned by Linspire back in 2005. There's a fork, called Kompozer, but even its authors just call it "Nvu's unofficial bug-fix release". The Gimp has its enthusiasts, but it's not really targeted at graphic artists. Look at its web site. Would you get a graphics tool from those people?
Everyone is missing the point. I need to upgrade Photoshop, believe it or not I'm still using 6.0, but that's kind of the point. I get by fine on a six or eight year old version of Photoshop because it does what I need it to do. There are features I need in the newer versions so I will buy a copy soon. What this is really about is a constant revenue stream. It's getting harder and harder for them to add features so in ten years it's going to be tough to make a case why you should buy the new upgrade. Hardware changes will be the main reason but once again Photoshop isn't likely to need to be upgraded that often for that reason because in ten years hardware changes will slow. Companies want to continue to increase profits not see them fade. 3D animation software has a long was to go but image editing largely arrived years ago. The biggest improvements have been in things like Apeture. Photoshop has been a perfectly adequate application for most uses for at least ten years now. The last big must have upgrades for me were History and Layers. The rest is great to have but I'm painting textures all day and other than a lot more brush tools I don't need much. I'd love to see functions like Painter or Dogwaffle has for doing custom brushes but that's the biggest thing I can see. Adobe has resisted such things because they refuse to acknowledge that a large percentage of their uses paint not process photos. The two biggest things that they refuse to do is add animation support and more paint tools. In the old days people were trying to use Photoshop for compositing effects shots but Adobe flat out refused to add sequencial frame and animation support. Since then there are counts apps for doing it that have come out but back in the day Photoshop was the only app that had the potential for doing it. I dred the day they go on-line only and I'll tell you I'm not giving up my 6.0 disks for anything. I want to make sure I always have a useable version I can freely install. If they go strictly on-line I may seriously consider the switch to Gimp. I'm sure a lot feel that way which will probably force a two tiered model. high end users can buy a copy for X dollars or the regular users can get it for Y a month. Microsoft has claimed they were going to an on line model for years but they met with major resistance. I'll tell you the first time I couldn't work because my internet service was down I'd switch to Gimp. They are going to want to be very careful about pissing off users.
This is the perfect move for Adobe. They almost completely eliminate piracy by putting the application online. Next, they get automatic cross-platform support, including Linux. It's wins across the board.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Adobe Photoshop bought on the US site: $649
Adobe Photoshop bought on the UK site: £485 (excluding vat). That's $992
This is to buy a registration code for a demo that you have already downloaded.
That's just insulting to a UK person who want's to do the right thing.
And before you say 'why not buy it at the US store', they check the origin of your credit card.
Same Product, Same delivery mechanism, 50% price premium.
Why?
...you need to jump through hoops and buy something.
Ick.
I'm doing this on a hellafast workstation, yet I've been spending most of my morning surfing the net and sucking coffee while Adobe's bitch chomps through my frames to deliver low-res previews.
And Adobe thinks I'm going to add Interweb pipes into the equation?
I think you answered your own question, but you apparently don't realize it.
e
Adobe is going to sell "web services", not just on the basis of everything that we've heard before (updates, data security, work anywhere, etc), but in Adobe's case specifically on the ability to deliver tremendous computing power for your rendering. You have a single fast computer--great. How much faster would your morning have gone if you could take advantage of 10,000 very fast, parallelized, dedicated rendor nodes? Your renders might be just about instant.
The only question then becomes how do you get your raw data up to the cloud at an acceptable speed. I dunno--matbe you send them raw data in a can. Perhaps they figure that you will be patient enough to leave the upload running unattnded since it doesn't reqiure interaction; but the tradeoff is that you get instant results during the time when you want to be interacting.
Think about the benefits of having a massive Adobe data center at your disposal for rendering. The only one that should be scared is the vendor of that workstation that you currently have.
--
$tar -xvf
The bottome line is copy protection. I know more people with pirated versions of Adobe software than I know of companies that use the products... it's that bad. The main problem is their steep price tags on their software, though many people are so cheap these days it wouldn't suprise me if the problems were the same even if prices were slashed. At my work, we have two problems that this situation would affect. 1) we use Photoshop almost daily and 2) we have notoriously bad internet with it going down about 1 - 2 times a month. From a personal standpoint that's fine, 1 - 2 free days off a month, but from a business standpoint, those are lost days. Sure, we can blame the poor ISP for what its worth, but the fact is that the time is still lost and we all know that time is $money$. I think that personally, I'll pick up a copy of the normal version that runs locally and probably just never update to a web-based app because frankly, the web isn't where I want to do my image editing, document creation or anything else quasi-productive. I'd much rather work on my local machine and then upload, etc.
The global warming crowd is just as rediculous. They're making predictions of doom in 100 years time. We've come a long way from the Wright Brother's motorized glider, horse drawn plows, and not much else in the last 100 years. We've seen the invention/discovery of AM/FM radio, television, computers, atomic fission, and spaceships just to name a few things our great great grandparents could barely imagine.
As someone who works in the graphics industry, I have found dealing with Adobe in the box reliable. Now, with Online subscription, etc, I feel that this may crash. At least, I know that places that use these products reluctant to change to things like this. The resources that will be needed would be extraordinary and, well, the old saying goes... "If it an't broke, don't fix it."
Keep in mind when Chizen talks about After Effects and Illustrator online, this is not even similar to the actual desktop applications.
Seeing his online Photoshop and Premiere offers, it's just brand abuse. Said online applications are very simplified Picassa like photo manipulator for consumers, and online Premiere allows you to click few pre-made clips and join them together with few premade transitions.
I really find it insulting Adobe abuses their brands this way, spreading confusion and doubt among their own customers. Yes, their brands are quite popular, but they're doing a very good job at diluting them.
They need to trim it down (disk/memory/cpu usage), get Adobe products to fit and run smoothly on simple systems.
Imagine having Photoshop on your iPHone/googlePHONE 2.0 and it would run as quick as notepade for startup/saving etc...
With a touch screen you can bust out a stylus and work the magic. features, bells and whistles are great, but not so much at the cost of performance.
~CYD
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
I'll bet the success of this rivals the success of the java browser replacing the operating system.
Nothing would please me more than to use a least common denominator User Interface for complex minipulation of pictures and movies. I bet it will work great on dial up too!
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
As people start doing more and more things with their web browsers, I see them shifting more and more toward proprietary software and formats. There was an interview in Newsweek recently with Adobe's CEO, and he was saying things like (paraphrased from memory): "People use Adobe software all the time, and they don't even realize it. Virtually every web site has flash, and that means you're using our product. Every time you read a pdf file, you're using our product." Now a lot of this was semi-bogus (there isn't flash on virtually every web site *I* visit, and personally when I view a pdf, I usually use xpdf or evince), but there's an element of truth to it. The browser wars created a giant sucking sound in terms of open standards for having your browser do something more than render static html. Netscape and MS screwed around with their nonstandard, incompatible versions of the "embed" tag, while the w3c pushed "object," which nobody ever bothered to support properly. Meanwhile, users just wanted to watch videos, play games, etc., and they found out that they could do that using flash. Unfortunately, flash is highly proprietary. (Yes, I know about gnash, haxe, etc., but they're severely limited in what they can do, because the codecs are all proprietary, and so is various other flash stuff like the standard gui widgets described in books on flash.) Now take a look around at ajax-based web apps. They're almost all proprietary. The basic model seems to be that you're supposed to do all your work using software that you don't own, and aren't even licensing -- half the code isn't even running on the client, it's running on the server. Sure, there are a few GPL'd ajax apps (fckeditor, kupu,...), but the vast majority of these apps bear the same relationship to OSS as antimatter bears to matter. I like the idea of web apps, my kids love to play flash games, etc., --- but we have to watch out how this is all implemented, because it could very easily take us backward into a dark age for open source. As soon as javascript was first introduced, developers who Just Didn't Get It about open source started complaining that javascript was an interpreted language, so everyone would be able to see their code. Never mind that users might actually feel that they had a right to know what code was being run automatically on their machine when they clicked on a link and landed on a web site -- the closed-source mentality was that this was a bad thing, because people would steal the code, etc. Well, ajax is creating a situation that caters to exactly that closed-source mentality, because the js code on the client is only one part of the app, and the rest of the code is securely hidden on a server -- along with the user's own data, which he no longer really owns.
Find free books.
The biggest issue I see is with IP on images. Not just copyrights, but also information pertaining to subject matter.
I have trouble envisioning Adobe's bloated applications running satisfactorily in a Web environment
Adobe is already working on a web based version of Photoshop and there's a video of it in action here: http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9790168-2.html
I think when people think web applications they're thinking something created using AJAX. I know how the slashdot crowd loves to hate flash, but if you're building it in flash the performance is actually pretty decent. Check out the flash based online wordprocessor, Buzzword. It's the best online wordprocessor I've used. It's still in beta so you have to sign up to preview it, but here's a video of it in action.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Adobe, but I make a living using their products.
Erm..., How long is a decade?
America, Home of the Brave.
Apparently the linux kernel is now up to around 64GB of memory, but good luck getting all that in your box. The MBP can be configured with up to 16GB of memory, so it could take pretty good advantage of a 64-bit photoshop today.
for security reasons? How would you use Adobe software on a desktop with no Network access?
Some people like to do work on a computer that is not tied to other computers, and then burn CDs or DVDs and move the works to other computers later.
With Online Applications it also opens the door to Malware infections.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Flash is not a technology that make it run fast and nice.
I mean, it will be flash based. I can watch an ugly video in a flash based online player eating a considerable part of my processing power. I can watch the same video with much better quality in stage6.divx.com and it takes no noticeable processing power at all.
And what about GUI Interface guidelines. Every single flash "app" I have ever seen implements GUI elements differently. The mouse wheel has never had a consistent behaviour in flash apps. If the change from Office 2003 to Office 2007 is so huge for users, imagine if all your apps has different GUI controls, GUI metaphors, GUI guidelines, and so on.
Besides that, we already have Java Webstart. And no single big commercial app has been ported to, or written in, Java Webstart.
May be end users don't like non native applications in their systems. May be end users don't like subscription based pricing. May be end users don't like Flash based apps.
I want a competing technology with a decent language and native widgets to emerge. Open source if possible. That would be great.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I work at a medium-sized printing house in their prepress department and my specific job primarily uses Photoshop for color correction, retouching, etc. I've used Photoshop for over 10 years including schooling and various jobs. To me creating an online version of Photoshop just doesn't make very much sense. Photoshop is one of those programs where its demands scale each release (RAM, processor, HD space, etc). I can't see a reason where I'd want to create a significant bottleneck by using an "internet app." I regularly work on files over 200 MBs each and working over a local network frustrates me enough already that I can only imagine that an "internet app" would be magnitudes worse. I'm glad Adobe is looking ahead but I hope they blindly don't assume that what is best for their corporation is best for their users. Ten years down the road is a long time and tech will probably be significantly different than what we have today. However I still think some things don't change. I personally don't want to rent software or deal with advertising within a program (causing it to be free, but reducing my efficiency). I think most of us would rather own something than rent it. Also add that in 10 years the whole world will not be magically wired with fiber or whatever so if all software companies start going on a purely "internet software solution" any developing country will be thrown a nice roadblock halting their tech progression at least in using the latest software. Consider that CS3 really didn't give many reasons to upgrade over CS2 (at least in Photoshop) if Adobe doesn't play it smart you'll have a lot of people using previous versions (think XP vs. Vista).
Um. No. If you've invested thousands of dollars up front, you're less likely to chuck your application suite than if you're going to pay the same next month as this month.
Let's say you're paying $X per month to Adobe. Some worthy competitor comes along and offers you a comparable suite for $Y per month, where Y X. Remember, you're free to leave Adobe next month and come back the month after if you're happier with their stuff. That creates a lot more decision points than the boxed suite. That means a lot more chances to affect your decision, and therefore more marketing.
There could be year-by-year subscription contracts, but then you might as well be buying the box because you're probably going to upgrade every year or two anyway. It won't be less advertising in any case, because you'll still have an annual decision to make.
The biggest advantage to most over-the-wire applications isn't less advertising. It isn't necessarily the pricing model, either, although that's certainly a good one to put in first place. Another choice for the prize, though, is the development methods network delivery allow you to use.
If you sell a box, you have to try to get all the features in the box and get them all right all at once. Otherwise, you piss people off that they paid so much for your box and spent time installing it only to install huge chunks of it over again online anyway. With a network delivery model, you can offer something much more modular. If it's actually working live across the wire, as the quotes in TFS imply, then you can also upgrade people's application across all customers simultaneously. You can roll out new features or improvements to existing features piecemeal, because you're not rolling trucks to get them to the users. It's a continual, gradual update process to go along with the continual, gradual payments you receive. It makes software a service industry rather than a product industry, and many people think that's a good thing.
You are comparing global warming models/predictions to what software such as Photoshop will be like in years to come? Wow. I'm glad we've come a long way from gliders, horse drawn plows and not much else. All that other stuff humanity has created/engineered/imagined was "rediculous" anyways.
Chizen expects professional customers of products like Acrobat document-sharing or Photoshop for editing images would opt to pay for subscriptions versus facing a steady stream of advertising to use tools critical to their jobs.
Or maybe those professionals would either choose to develop in-house applications to accomplish their business needs, or find a product that does neither. Companies need to learn that annoying and alienating their customers, or extorting them in the method used above, is not a good business practice. I expect that if Photoshop becomes either ad-based or online, GIMP will take off like wildfire.
If you have a near-monopoly on the 2D graphics software industry, you no longer have to pay attention to the demands of your customers. The customers are no longer important, and you'll discover that they will tolerate all kinds of abuse to continue to use your software. Charging them by the minute and making them pay for a subscription instead of an actual software package is very smart from the Adobe point of view. It guarantees a continuous flow of money and no chance of piracy.
Some 80 year olds are going to have to come out of retirement to make this thing work.
vi +
As this software is going to be run presumably directly on the Web or through a delivery system like STEAM, what choice does the user have of upgrading the software? If its web-based are you using only the current version or can you choose ver 1.0, 1.5 and such. Forcing upgrades on customers would force them to accept the bugs of the current version which may effect productivity and being able to complete a task causing delay, reduction in productivity and such. I don't think the system of delivery would affect speed of patches either.
Ok who broke the article? I know someone around here is to blame...
"a degree in some other field, such as software engineering, and then decide they want to take up graphic design?"
;)
They could apply that degree by writing their own image editing software.
I don't want to be tied to a network connection just to get my work done. Quite a few of my epiphanies happen when I'm offline but I still have a laptop handy.
He who laughs last...probably didn't get the joke.
I depend heavily on Photoshop, but there is no chance in hell that I will use it or any other application that's tied to the web. I don't use or need any other Adobe products, thankfully, so I only need to wean myself off of one application. Goodbye Adobe, I won't miss you. Goodbye Photoshop, I *will* miss you, but sometimes you just have to let go.
no doubt this is an issue, but I do think that hefty student discounts do help recover some of the exposure lost by reducing casual piracy.
But really... individual, non commercial piracy of photoshop should not be a big issue for adobe.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
This is a 10 year plan. Can you imagine 10 years ago the things we can do today with computers?
Citrix and others have something called web streaming applications. This means that I install Adobe Photoshop onto a Citrix server and my users connect to Citrix to work in it.
But unlike traditional Citrix, once the application is streamed to them it continues to run on their computer even if they move away from the Internet connection.
This works because the application is virtualized onto their computer. It's not installed in the traditional sense. That would require a license. It's only installed on Citrix. But it RUNS within the client PC in a virtual environment. I'm not positive about Citrix, but in Microsoft's solution this environment can be separate from the OS they are running. So I can run things that only work in XP on a Vista machine, for example.
Anyway, just because Adobe makes this web based doesn't mean you are tied to an Internet connection to continue working. And in 10 years, I'd hope that we would all have 1Gb/s wireless Internet connections covering the entire planet, with backup systems in place.
I welcome the change. This was the idea behind thin clients in the 1990's. An idea Microsoft worked very hard to kill with licensing, purchasing and destroying companies in this niche, and other attacks against it.
This kind of prediction/action by Adobe raises a bunch of issues.
One is that, even in 10 years, the Internet may not penetrate everywhere on
the planet with sufficient bandwidth to make these applications feasible. So
a part of the market (admittedly, probably a small part) is cut off.
More importantly, there are environments where the possibility, let alone the
reality, of data leaving the premises is not acceptable. The most obvious example
is the (large, and apparently growing) classified world. Will it become impossible
to make a classified briefing with the latest version of Adobe's products?
It's all very well talking about having applications that run over the internet instead on your home pc (a sort of basterdised version of dumb-terminals), but what about the security of the files you're sending to the application in the first place? Surely the unedited files are no longer stored just on your pc, but someone else has a copy of it. Do you trust this third party? I wouldn't.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I use After Effects (and Photoshop) on a daily basis. It's one of the more power-hungry and processor intensive programs out there. Why the FUCK would I want to cripple it 100-fold by moving it to a Java applet, or whatever? This HAS to be a joke, right? What next, Maya, Lightwave, and Cinema 4D Max as Flash applications on a website?
No fucking way. If Adobe does this, I'm jumping over to Motion.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
There's also Aviary. Adobe itself announced they're working on Photoshop Express, after announcing Premiere Express, both on the web. A few weeks ago they bought Buzzword after hinting on an online office suite. Those all run in the Flashplayer, and Hydra will let developers write pixel shaders for Flashplayer 10.
With all those new dev tools (Flex Builder, Thermo) and that C/C++ to Actionscript 3 converter, one might get the impression they're moving away from banners. But maybe that's just me.
I'm not interested in having my applications transitioned to the web because:
1) lack of bandwidth
2) lack of reliability of the network
3) I want to buy once, use on my schedule as many times as I want
4) I hate subscription services - it's a way to suck our wallets dry a little at a time
The solution is just don't upgrade. The older versions still work fine. I'm still using Adobe Photoshop (which I paid for) version 6.03. It works great. It does the job. Every time I don't upgrade I save money. A penny saved is 1.36 earned after taxes. If enough people don't upgrade to the web based applications then Adobe will dump those applications because they won't be profitable to maintain. If enough people don't upgrade at all Adobe will tank. That wouldn't be so bad given their arrogance. I've known and worked with the company since they were 0 days old. The new Adobe is a bloated shadow of the old.
Moving PhotoShop online presents two problems:
Currently, only Safari supports color management (sRGB, Adobe RGB, etc.), so they either need to include their own browser or work with *all* vendors (no bets here, but the former will probably win out).
I just can't imagine scanning in an 8x10 at 600dpi 32 bit color & then expecting it to render online. We'd be looking at a several hundred meg image here.
Perhaps Adobe's online suite will come with plane fare to Japan where there's *real* broadband...
I picked the 8gig PSD file size out of a hat. I'm aware 64bit can address far more.
Personally i'm tired of these fucking copyprotection schemes. These companies will go out of their way, in the face of performance just to protect what they think is sacred.
Imagine how pissed i was today when i realized my 8800GTX ($600 when i bought it) cant play HD-DVD's on my Hp30 inch monitor because the 8800GTX doesnt have HDCP over dual link.... however the cheaper 8600 nvidia does...
sigh. I'm furious about the state of software and the business minds that ruin this tool we know as a computer.
Oh come on, the PC revolution happened because people wanted to own their own hardware. There used to be a time where everything was done on big iron and small terminal and you even paid by the hours of computing time you had. When people saw the IBM PC and the Apple II, they never looked back.
Microsoft knows that if they break backward computability people will scream. And they do scream.
Microsoft used to care about backwards compatibility, now... not so much. Office 2000 doesn't work well on Vista (mail merge broken), Outlook 2000 has problems (MS changed the Windows Address Book protocol. Many older USB drivers don't work on Vista. MS is not stupid, they figure out how much pain an upgrade can inflict vs. how much they'll get from forced software updates vs. the effort required vs. how many users will reject the update. Other software vendors like Adobe go along; why should they care about my problems running Fireworks 4 on Vista?
What blows my mind is how many people unthinkingly accept the idea that any software more than 5 years old is unlikely to still work. Backwards compatibility is hard but far from impossible, back in the Windows 3.0 and 95 days MS made extreme efforts because they wanted to move people to Windows.
=S