Adobe Intends To Move All of Its Applications Online 283
A user 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.'"
Loading time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the piracy.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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....)
Re:Good luck... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Given the piracy.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and if their only choice is to pay for it, they will opt not to use it at all. Either way, Adobe's sales dept will notice little or no difference, while they will have spent millions trying to stop the "problem".
Licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
10 years (Score:2, Insightful)
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 a maturity problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:10 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
Market? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good luck... (Score:5, Insightful)
Web-basing something like Photoshop is just stucking fupid.
Re:YAY! (Score:3, Insightful)
They'll offer both versions (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:10 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Adobe CEO Announces his impending departure... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
People, stop panicing!! (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Given the piracy.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:10 years (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
So maybe that's their plan? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Who is this bozo? (Score:3, Insightful)
Adobe has real problems, then. Here's the bio of their CEO, Bruce Chizen [adobe.com]. 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 [nvu.com], which had real promise, was abandoned by Linspire back in 2005. There's a fork, called Kompozer [kompozer.net], 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. [gimp.org] Would you get a graphics tool from those people?
Re:Good luck... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Foxit is NOT free.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good luck... (Score:2, Insightful)
moving toward a world of proprietary computing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:10 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Your post is only three lines long, and you still couldn't maintain a consistent position throughout.
Nice Idea but... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.