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.'"
Proper English like what it is spoke (Score:3, Funny)
Fixed it again. Next person that says transition gets a poke in the eye.
Re:Proper English like what it is spoke (Score:4, Funny)
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"Confidently lead the market with differentiated outsourcing services leveraging our key differentiators"
"Market leading unique services"
Just saved them a million or two there.
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"Confidently lead the market with differentiated outsourcing services leveraging our key differentiators"
"Market leading unique services"
Just saved them a million or two there.
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Good luck... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Good luck... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not to mention the complete lack of a demand for this sort of thing. I can kind of see the online office suite. It'd be useful for people who use many different computers, and for sharing documents. It's not my bag, but I can see a potential market. But why would anybody want online professional photo-editing software? Or an online Flash? Wha
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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.
Bingo. This is someone who just read a book about software-as-a-service and decided "damn, this is what we need to do!" Which is understandable, because SAS is a tempting model. As the provider, you get to milk your customers continuously, instead of just once or every few years. And unlike selling upgrades, you don't have to constantly sell them on the value of version X+0.1 and how superior it is to version X. All you have to make sure is that they're still happy with the service overall.
I'm reminded a l
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Well using a combination of some big server farms, Ajax and javascript on your local system, and the fact the broadband is getting more common and faster it is becoming quite possible. Lot of the heavy duty stuff in Photoshop is handling small changes on big pictures, if you can have Adobe high end super fast servers handle the work and then you get a 1 Meg file to display to your screen. Then using ImageMaps and Javascript to handle the rest. It could work. it would take s
Re:Good luck... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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ThinkingInBinary circa 1997 (Score:3, Interesting)
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Er, email is on the order of 10K per message. Photo editing is on the order of 10M-10G per image, depending on the size of image you're using. That's a very big difference.
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So, it's got to be some kind of joke, or as inapt then as it is now.
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In fact, that goes for any web application, as far as I'm concerned. Pull all the data you want from the network, but get the hell out of my web browser and all the compromises that entails.
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Will people even want online versions of these programs? I don't have a crystal ball anymore than the jerk who made the announcement, but the web is currently very much able to deliver a word processor or a spreadsheet. Despite their feasibility, I resent the very idea of an online office suite. Even if I knew there would be no browser issues and that my connection wouldn't go down at an unexpected moment I still wouldn't because it'd just feel wrong. Judging by the number of friends and colleagues who've c
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This is a poor idea.
Lets assume for a minute that it can be done and that it performs well and they can implement good keyboard shortcuts and a usable UI in the browser.
FireFox crashes a hell of a lot more often than my Mac does. It crashes way more often than my windows machine does. Im Imagining myself editing a document with one of these things and loosing a bunch of work because firefox decides to shit the bed. Never mind any crashes that are actually caused by the application adobe writes. All this
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This is about serving apps over the internet, not install the 5 DVDs locally and connect to activate every time (but wouldn't that be nice...for them).
Re:Good luck... (Score:5, Insightful)
Web-basing something like Photoshop is just stucking fupid.
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"Let's move to the web." - It seems like a good business approach and for some stuff it is. Web based banking is great. Web based email is pretty good (depending on the service of course). Web based photo editing would be worse than sucky.
However, some business people see that web based is good for some stuff so it must be good for everthing.
NEWS FLASH: Just because something works
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- Constant updates
- Multiplatform (Photoshop for Linux, finally)
- Ability to run from any machine, not only those where you installed it.
- Ability to access any plug-in in existance... you preview the results, and pay for use if you need/like the effect.
- Ability to access any font in existance (likewise)
- Same thing with actions, clip art, stock material, etc.
- Ability to use the program a single time (eg: once a year you need Adobe Illustrator for a couple of hours, so you pay for a
Yes, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
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On the plus side, it would mean linux users can use photoshop on a level playing field to windows/mac users, eliminating a major reason for some people to stick to windows.
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[Flex] is quite capable of delivering all the features of a full blown app, and it is cross browser, cross platform out of the box.
The one thing it can't deliver is native code and the speed that a fully compiled application can. I'm guessing that Flex also won't let you manage your own memory (for memory-intensive applications, this is really helpful), or make the fast calls to the operating system (since it's abstracted, it wouldn't make sense to let you make faster, operating-system-specific calls).
That's not to say that a web environment is bad, far from it, but for a large, resource-heavy and complex program (like photoshop),
Loading time... (Score:5, Insightful)
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You've obviously never used Quark.
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Try Photoshop CS3 (Score:2)
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: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".
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and considerably fewer people will know how to use photoshop (or after effects or any other app) at all. You will be more likely to end up with graphic designers who use something else because they couldn't afford photoshop when they learned photo editing.
Student piracy is not always a bad thing... of course this could be solved with very aggressive student pricing.
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I remember 20 years ago when Apple II was still king on campus & started taking antipiracy steps. Microsoft was being rampantly pirated & that is how they got critical mass & took over.
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This doesn't surprise me. Go around any college campus and just about everybody has Photoshop. Very few actually paid for it. (Granted I've heard the argument from one of their own campus reps that they didn't mind it as much on college campuses because then we go out into the work world and buy the upgrades or the businesses we work for buy the products)
I have my own anecdotal confirmation. We had pirated copies of photoshop out the wazzoo at the dotcom I was at. When I later worked for a real company and they dumped a project on me, I requested photoshop instead of something cheaper like paint shop pro since I was already familiar with the photoshop interface. It would have been a tremendous headache to try to learn a different package when under a deadline.
Consider the qwerty keyboard. It sucks cock like a closeted Republican senator but everybody stick
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About time (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
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YAY! (Score:2)
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 themsel
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Then get on one of the other 10 editing bays and get it done.
The internet connection is a single point of failure at a TV studio. Im actually kind of curious how many editing bays are even internet connected at places like that. Downtime is just too expensive to risk those getting infected.
Licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
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You are right on. They'll have a two-tier product. One that runs on the desktop and is essentially both client and server on the same machine. They will let this version be pirated just like they do now. The other a server to which you attach licensed clients.
FYI, the abomination called Cry
I don't use Adobe (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
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Why?
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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.
Re:10 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Your post is only three lines long, and you still couldn't maintain a consistent position throughout.
Dumbest Idea ever. Adobe is stupid. Go 64bit FIRST (Score:2)
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
Re:Dumbest Idea ever. Adobe is stupid. Go 64bit FI (Score:2)
Re:Dumbest Idea ever. Adobe is stupid. Go 64bit FI (Score:2)
Let me get this straight.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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?
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.
Allow me to be the first to say, WTF? (Score:2)
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 hear
You have got to be kidding me! (Score:2)
However, there is something I have to smirk at. Lets make D
How is this news? (Score:2, Funny)
Market? (Score:3, Insightful)
No Conx? (Score:2)
10 years?! (Score:2)
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We (hopefully) will all be using IPv6 and have 1G fibre-to-the-home and 200M cell phone links and some marketing ploy will call it Internet-3G or Web 5.0 but it will still be the ol' internet with all the spam unless we hire ninja assassins to kill all spam-lords.
They can't possibly make Acrobat any clunkier (Score:2)
Worst. Transition. Ever. (Score:2)
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.
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.
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Compelling reasons? (Score:2)
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?
Distributed work load. (Score:2)
I can't see adobe ponying up for all that server power just so that they can stop people ripping off their software.
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
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
Oh, Just Come Out and Say It (Score:2)
Why don't SW companies 'get it'? (Score:4, Interesting)
I want my bits, on my box, in my house, available when I want them.
Move Over, NetScape! (Score:2)
Sa-Yo-O-Na-Ra.
Maybe he means like Steam? (Score:4, Informative)
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?
moving toward a world of proprietary computing (Score:3, Insightful)
But what if you work on a Non-Internet box (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
All Hail the Mainframe (Score:3, Funny)
Some 80 year olds are going to have to come out of retirement to make this thing work.
Re:Sure glad I'm weaning off adobe now (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Sure glad I'm weaning off adobe now (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Sumatra was Re:Sure glad I'm weaning off adobe now (Score:4, Interesting)
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/ [kowalczyk.info]
William
Re:Sumatra was Re:Sure glad I'm weaning off adobe (Score:2, Informative)
I switched to Foxit Reader and have not had the same issues since.
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*Note: The implied age of the internet is not conclusive nor based on any sort of fact, but rather was a mostly uninformed guess. Please don't kill me.