Adobe's online applications play

Adobe seems to be throwing their hat into the "software-as-service" market: first they announced (and released into beta) an online video editing application ("Remix"), and now they've announced an online version of Photoshop in the next few months.

It'll be interesting to see what direction this takes... re-bundling applications with some online metering (ala GameTap or the like) will get some small traction in the short term, or maybe work for some niche markets or legacy application environments. But this is at best a bridging strategy - its a goofy "web" experience that doesn't embrace any of the real values (other than raw pricing) of software-as-services, and in the medium to long term.

Everyone's been experimenting with this for years and years, and it's just not workable... unfortunately the paradigm doesn't "feel" right.

Of course, that's not what Adobe's doing - Remix is a completely, ground up, brand new web application. That's good, though the problem is that, being brand new, its really not particularly more feature rich or capable than any other web video editor (like Jumpcut or EyeSpot). The only really "edge" Adobe has is brand value - and web users are pretty fickle.

So - I'm curious to see what "online Photoshop" looks like. One the one hand, a real web app is the right way to go, and what I'd like to see - and I think its important they start this now before someone else does it first (it'll happen). On the other hand, I think if its a true web app, version 1.0 will likely not be a real Photoshop replacement in any meaningful way... and it'll get dinged pretty good for that.

This has to be a commitment for the long term.

Cracking the right design patterns for "offline" web applications will also make a big difference for moving them beyond casual users, I think, among other things...