JD on EP

Related item: Thomas Claburn at InformationWeek writes in "Adobe Photoshop Online Faces Disinterest From Photo Pros": "Adobe clearly has to ramp up its efforts to expand, if not transition, its lucrative shrink-wrapped software business online. An online version of Photoshop should appeal to the average consumer, much as does Google's Picasa or other online photo services. But professional photographers -- the major users of Photoshop -- may not be won over so easily."

Other people at Adobe know these issues much better than me, but from the little I've seen, that's not the goal -- online apps aren't seen as replacing offline apps, but instead supplementing them. Different people will want and use different packages of imaging technology.

John Nack's comment points directly to this, when he mentions not only Photoshopifying the Web, but also Webifying the Photoshop. There are lots of different needs to fill now.

Gavin Clarke at The Register saw it like this: "Online ads diet planned for Adobe Photoshop: Adobe Systems is the latest boxed-product vendor to put its software online and embrace the ads-based revenue model."

Reading this made me realize something... at one time the business was about selling boxes in computer stores... then mailorder and CD-ROMs were the delivery method... the last few years people have been downloading integrated sets of creative tools, to run on their desktop.

The packages have changed, but Photoshop itself has always sold digital enfranchisement for imaging work. That's what I see today in the research groups within Adobe: the continuing advancement of imaging capability. That's the core "thing" within each generation of packaging -- the increasing ability to work with digitial images.

Lucky timing, too... now that there are lots more people who want to casually publish their images, there are lots more ways to serve them. Lots of variations up ahead.... ;-)