I wonder how they are going to circumvent the most major issue: speed of light.

It takes ages to do anything over internet.

Adobe to go fully belly up within a decade....good riddance.

No company with half a brain would give up control of their productivity suite.

Speaking from the point of view of somebody who works with Adobe software (specifically Acrobat) professionally on a regular basis, in a company where everybody uses the software daily, making the software web-based would have absolutely catastrophic results for businesses. What if one person can't connect to the network, or the company has a limited number of licenses that people are constantly fighting for? How does it affect processing time, and how does this affect documents where client-attorney privilege and confidentiality come into play? Problems that already exist in the locally-installed version would probably be more difficult to troubleshoot and solve, and entirely new ones could crop up. It'd just be a complete disaster on the enterprise end of things.

I can see Adobe making a suite of web-based software for the home user, but it's simply not at all feasible for business solutions. They're out of their minds if they think it's going to work for large businesses.

adobe software is bloated enough when installed on your computer. now they actually expect it to be able to run properly when it's web-based?

Heh. This made me laugh: a new generation of Internet users "for whom paying $400 for a packaged software product is a thing of the past".

That's a great way of saying "kids today get our software for free by stealing it because we price it outside their ability or willingness to pay, so we're going to make it so they can't get it without paying". He makes it sound so forward-thinking and innovative and consumer-focused.

I love how these companies feel they can do anything they want with their software after we, the consumer, purchase it. It's as if they've never realized there are decent, free competitors out there like Linux, OpenOffice, AbiWord, Gimp, etc. that fill the bill for 90% of the world and competitors who will more than happily fill in the rest of the 10% if their greed creates that opening.

This seems somewhat ridiculous at first-blush coming from a company with so many applications that lean so heavily on system performance and bandwidth.

We're not talking about simple document creation here, we're talking about some of the most resource-intensive tasks around. Even their current desktop-hosted solutions don't all have outstanding performance, even with everything located a high-bandwidth, low-latency link away. That said, a decade is a long time. At the very least web-based delivery makes sense, as do basic versions of more capable offline apps.

I'm not a fan myself.. but I think some of you are totally missing how this would work.
The program would run on the Adobe servers. The program will NOT stream to your pc. You log in... the UI is all that needs to stream to you. Then you Upload photo to work on.. or grab from saved folder on Adobe account... you work in the UI on their servers.

The only data that would pass back and forth would be the UI and the displayed image.

It's a "good" idea long term for software companies because then no one ever owns anything..

I'm pretty sure he's talking about software delivery.

Honestly, these sorts of statements should be taken with a lot of salt, because I doubt Mr. Chizen has even considered the technical details. They're just looking at the success of GMail and want to replicate it. Since they are going to be competing with Microsoft head-to-head in the desktop application space, I imagine they want to push the idea that they're going to be leapfrogging Microsoft in the software-as-a-service department.

Ultimately, Bruce Chizen wants to boost Adobe's share price with this statement. Companies don't announce stuff that is a decade away in the computer software market.

Well, except for 3D Realms. :)

Oh, and keep in mind that as stuff like Flash and Silverlight become more powerful, "real" applications code can be embedded in web pages much better than they could in the past. Make no mistake, though. That Photoshop filter will still be executed on your local processor. And it won't be written in Javascript. :)

This is lunacy; unless he's talking about a means of delivering software, no one in their right mind is going to rely on web-based applications like the CS series--the performance even on a fast network would still be atrocious compared to that of a fast desktop with a local installation.

We've seen this before in the late 90s with the folks from Sun telling us that thin clients were going to be all the rage...it flies in the face of a very simple fact: users always want more power on the desktop, not less.

I have to agree I dont see how something like photoshop can be web based and work very well. I have photoshop elements 5 installed on my computer and it is over 300 megs. Streaming all the features of a program that large to a PC everytime the person wants to use it would take an UBER fast connection.

If adobe had a free version that was web based and you had a need for one of their programs once. Say to edit one photo then maybe suffering through streaming the program to your PC would be ok. For daily use though it would suck

This may be an unrealistic statement for Adobe. The speed of the internet is the last thing you want to affect your program's performance. Large programs such as Photoshop and Premiere can have simple web-based offshoots, but by no means are they going to be anywhere near the capabilities of their packaged siblings. In the near future, the web-based platform for applications may stabilize and even standardize to a single core implementation, but by that time desktop platforms will have matured to the a more refined point. Speed matters. No matter how fast the internet gets, the desktop will simply be faster, incur less overhead, and integrate far better.
If the CEO was referring to simply web-based delivery for a software system, he may be onto something.There is technically no reason why a service similar to Steam could pick up the downloadable application market. Performance-intense programs that manipulate huge quantities of data are just going to be poor candidates for web-based applications. Also, here in America, in 10 yrs we *might* catch up to current day European broadband speeds...which would make streaming a massive, feature complete program like photoshop still an all day affair.