Photoshop Online
Read that Adobe is going to release an online version of Photoshop (courtesy lifehacker).
Their reasoning is apparently that everyone else is doing it (online applications) and they don’t want to miss the party. They fear that google will get into the photo editing space and steal a market that could have been Adobe’s. The initial business plan says that revenue will be ad generated.
Here’s my question. If I’m editing a photo, how do you show me relevant ads? Also, how many page views is that going to be? Also, will I click on these ads while I’m editing my photo? It seems to me that they’ll need an online album/flickr component to drive page views. Even so, it’s pretty tough showing relevant ads for images, some of these images may have a little text associated with them, but it is doubtful that there will be enough. There’s no ads on flickr and many of the other hosted albums I’ve seen are part of a photo printing operation. So where is the ad revenue?
It seems to me that Google has an effect on many large companies that make them think that Google is their true competitor and they have to act on it. Now I’m not saying that hosted photoshop is necessarily a bad idea, but I think the reasoning they’re putting behind it (they don’t want google to take the space from them) is flawed and I wonder if that will affect the final product. I think it is reasonable to believe that Google will benefit from this, after all who’s ads are they going to put on this site? Yahoo’s? Please.
