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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 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...
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.
This is a good one. I use it regularly.
Sounds like a nice example of management desire to tie in charges-per-use is taking priority over unimportant stuff like app performance. Maybe we'll be proven wrong.
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
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!
Well, SOMEONE'S sour for losing at "bullshit bingo" in the last meeting with management.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's minimalist, but I find SumatraPDF useful:
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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 look forward to trying to use this while sitting on a train or plane on my laptop. Yes, I do appreciate that networking will be all pervasive in the future but I also know we have tunnels and dead spots.
Web-basing something like Photoshop is just stucking fupid.
AT&ROFLMAO
10 years is a LONG time in tech. I fully expect things to be quite different, online-wise, than they are now.
Has the internet changed that much since 1997? I'm sure, 10 years ago, someone said the exact same thing about the internet and how it was going to be super different, but it seems to me it's still the same old thing. I still use the same client programs to access everything the internet has to offer. Sure web sites are fancier but underneath it all it's still the same.
Now imagine that every single computer user uses web-based applications to do absolutely everything.
/. Simple economics dictates that as demand goes up and supply goes down prices automatically increase.
Online word processing
Online image editing
Online gaming
Online video and music (at first I thought to myself 'this is a stretch' and then and realized it's already common place a-la youtube and internet radio stations etc.)
Online e-mail (not really worth mentioning since it has already been so common for so long and is arguably one of the catalysts for the desire to move everything to the web)
Hell even a web-based OS with online file storage.
Now imagine the demand this will put on bandwidth.
Bandwidth is relatively cheap right now but there are already signs that it's not getting any cheaper. My ISP has raised it's cost by a couple of bucks / month TWICE in the last 6 months. We hear article and article about ISPs capping users and degrading service all the time on
As we move forward in this direction the demand for bandwidth is going to be astronomical. Prices will soar and performance will go downhill. The more I think about it the more I wonder if the entire concept is really sustainable with our current infrastructure. Of course the problem could be solvable. With competent software architects who can design these systems with great care to keep bandwidth consumption to an absolute minimum and with advancements in network technology we could offset the problem. It's just that there seems to be such a huge push towards moving everything web-based, and at the same time that we have a soar in online media such as youtube and all it's clones, internet radio, DVD piracy etc.
The question needs to be asked. Is this all blind business strategy or are people actually carefully considering how all of this increased demand is going to affect the infrastructure and how the infrastructure will be improved to handle it. Web applications in the now are sustainable but if every single Internet user starts to do everything online then the question needs to be answered.
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?
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Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
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've been using Foxit for probably 2 years now. It does more than just read PDFs. You can type directly into the PDF (look for "typewriter mode") and draw and mark it up with lines, squares, circles, and whatnot. It's great for PDF forms that must be downloaded and normally handwritten on, like the forms most company HRs post.
Your post is only three lines long, and you still couldn't maintain a consistent position throughout.