Online Platforms - The Next Step?

posted on 2nd March 2007 by Jon

Adobe have announced that their next edition of Photoshop will be a free, ad supported online version. This is a bold step by the imagery studio software maker as it puts the company firmly in the same space frequented by Google and other forward looking companies with their range of online applications. It also marks a major business decision for a company that has, to date, made money by selling licensed versions of its software.

One of my colleagues commented that it will be interesting to see how powerful this product actually is given that professional users of Photoshop would often need to upload very large image files as a starting point for a new project and that this could prove a problem for an online application. It could be that Adobe have this covered or that this version is merely meant to be a “lite” version of the real product that acts as a tantalising teaser to potential customers.

Another interesting area that will be worth watching out for is to what extent users be able to collaborate on files. Google’s documents and spreadsheets for example has really opened up the field on this and there are a host of new sites that provide an online area from which multiple users can comment and display their thoughts on the file or image in question. One cool example of this is a site called vYew. We’ve already been using this with a client who was out of the country and needed to comment on a site we’re building for him. It’s a very powerful tool. If Adobe can bring this kind of collaborative functionality into their new product - I think they could be on to something.