Smart Moves

1 March 2007

Adobe is undergoing an interesting transition at the moment. Ever since their merger with Macromedia, they seem to have become re-invigorated. The CS3 suite looks like it’s going to be pretty good – Photoshop is certainly going to be the biggest upgrade it’s had for a while.

However, what’s most interesting is what Adobe – traditionally very much a desktop application developer – is doing online. Flash has won the online video distribution battle thanks to YouTube, and the mistakes of Flash’s past have been realised and worked around. Couple this with Flex and Apollo and you can see that Adobe is certainly very interested in building web development tools.

What’s even more interesting is that they now seem to be interested in utilising their home-grown tools for their own ends, as they’ve just announced an online version of Photoshop. This is a big shot across the bows of any other web application developer – “Hi, we’re Adobe – one of the biggest software developers in the business. We’d really like to dominate your bit of the market too, if that’s all right with you?”.

Their are so many interesting points about this announcement; it’s obviously going to be based on Flex/Flash, which offers a very traditional development environment. It’s also going to be free (ad supported) – this is an interesting move when most conventional wisdom says that subscription based is more sensible. However, when you think that this is the base version, with Photoshop Elements and Photoshop above it, it ends up sounding like a smart move – they’re obviously going for market and mind share.

The other possibility is that Adobe may also offer up the same product for the desktop as well, using Apollo, which again will be very useful for getting some mind share – I can see lots of people using a free Photoshop Lite instead of Paint or Graphic Converter.

From: Articles

1 March 2007