"Hoping to get a jump on Google and other competitors, Adobe Systems plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months, the company's chief executive said Tuesday," reports CNet. "The online service is part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET News.com."
Adobe appears to be following the same line as Microsoft in the move to SaaS or Software as a Service (see note). Unlike the hosted version of Microsoft Office, which has been available online for half a decade or so, it seems it will be a cut-down version, and paid for by advertising. (Hosted software on the ASP or Application Service Provider model was core to the Microsoft.net strategy announced in June 2000. The ASP model flopped. "There were elements of this (Web services concept) that were premature," Gates said. "We made a misstep.")
The CNet story says:
The company intends to offer entirely hosted applications, as well as "hybrids," in which Adobe uses the Web to introduce features to desktop products, such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, he added.
"We recognize there is a customer there--we recognize they are not going to pay us, necessarily, directly. But we could use ad revenue as a model. Google has demonstrated that it works pretty well for certain types of applications," Chizen said.
It will be interesting to see what works. Ultimately, of course, people who think the Web is an either/or option for packaged software are still five years behind in their thinking. In reality, everybody running large applications will have code on their PC, PDA or phone or whatever, and code on the server, and they won't know or care where a particular feature resides.
For more hints about this direction, see my interview with Microsoft's Jeff Raikes
Note: See my Computer Weekly column for Wednesday 19 October 2005, based on an interview with Martin Taylor (who is no longer at Microsoft). He says:
"We are talking about delivering software as a service: how do we deliver value from the cloud? This is not the hosted, or ASP, model, it is delivering a set of services that people might want to use," he says. "Internally, we have got a strategy for all of our products of how we deliver value to customers via the cloud. Stage two is how we monetise that value."
