Carl Hutzler’s Blog

I saw this on Gizmodo originally.

Adobe has been developing a way to allow people to upload and edit photographs using standard web browsers. There are some sites that already do this, but seeing Adobe do this with the Photoshop brand is earth shattering in my opinion. My guess is that they are fairly scared about the possibility of losing ground in the retail/consumer space which could eventually trickle into their primary, $600 product, Photoshop.

We have seen this type of thing a lot lately where a company takes a traditionally “desktop” application and does a really nice job of creating an entirely “web based” application…and many times for free (ad supported). Email is one of these areas with Google Mail, AOL Mail, Yahoo Mail and now Live Office and Zimbra too. These online email applications are so “desktop like” that many people are ditching desktop email and using the web instead.

Of course Google and Microsoft are likely competing the fiercest on this front as Google roles out Calendar, Word Processing and Spreadsheet apps that in some cases (calendar) are better than the desktop versions. Microsoft is not sitting around waiting for Google to take over their Office productivity suite as they are working on a counter set of apps in MSFT Live.

And office suites are not the only thing that can be better on the web. We all know that Google Maps and Earth are way better than any desktop software put out by Delorme or Garmin. That is as long as you have a connection to the web which is becoming almost ubiquitous these days with the advent of 3G cellular based broadband for $40-$60 a month.

Not sure I am going to give up the speed and flexibility of my desktop image editting tools anytime soon, but for the consumer who shoots 20 pictures of their family vacation and just wants to edit them a little and then publish them to a website or order a few prints, this new Photoshop on the web may be a killer app. Watch out iPhoto!