Photoshop online within six months

By Stephen Withers
Thursday, 01 March 2007 04:56

Technology

Adobe will continue its move into the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market with a free, entry-level version of Photoshop.

According to News.com, the web-based Photoshop will be even simpler than Photoshop Elements (the consumer version of Adobe's pro image-editing application) and is likely to be ad-supported.

Adobe already offers Remix (a simplified version of Premiere Elements offered through Photobucket) and Create Adobe PDF Online (a subscription-based service for converting documents to Portable Document Format).

'Photoshop Online' (or whatever it is called) is likely to be offered via a partner, just as Remix is, but the News.com article does say that Adobe may offer such hosted services directly if it appears that the revenue would justify the necessary investment.

The balancing act Adobe must manage is to exploit the strength of the Photoshop brand as it addresses the low end of the market, but without doing anything to harm that brand among professionals. So however limited 'Photoshop Online' is, it seems certain that whatever functions it does perform will be done very well.

Various software companies including Google are offering web-based application delivery, and others including Microsoft and Corel are introducing blended applications that combine code running on the desktop with web-based elements or services.