newsmaker If you need more evidence of the Web shaking up the packaged software business, talk to Bruce Chizen.
The CEO of Adobe Systems oversees a company that successfully harnessed the power of an earlier technology wave -- personal computers -- for tasks like digital publishing and photography.
Now Adobe is looking to add Web-delivered services to its product line, says Chizen. The company has already developed an online video editor and, Chizen said, an online version of image editor Photoshop is in the works. Also in the works is Apollo, a new client development strategy due later this year.
As the company develops new products, it intends to combine the multimedia authoring skills it has in Photoshop, Premiere and other applications with the Web design and development savvy of Macromedia, Chizen said. Indeed, as Web-based applications become more functional, Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia -- maker of Flash and Web development tools -- looks better every day, especially as Microsoft continues to challenge Adobe with competing products.
In part one of a two-part interview, Chizen tells CNET.com.au sister site CNET News.com about Adobe's online strategy, discloses his plans for Photoshop, and discusses how to live with Microsoft the monopolist. In part two, to be posted later this week, Chizen talks about hidden gems in the Macromedia acquisition and how to beat Google.
We've talked about this in the past, but you have said that Adobe hasn't been concerned with the low end of the market because those are not your core customers. The creative professionals are your core customers. Is that still true?
Chizen: One thing that has changed is that the low end of the market is moving up in terms of expectations. The YouTube audience -- everybody wants to be a video publisher, everyone wants to be a creative. So we are doing some things like we have just announced with PhotoBucket and Remix, where we say we recognise there is a customer there, we recognise they are not going to pay us, necessarily, directly. But we could use ad revenue as a model. Google has demonstrated that it works pretty well for certain types of applications. So that's one of the things we are doing with the Remix product. You will probably see us do that with an image editor. We'll look at ways of reaching the consumer where they don't have to pay.
That's new for Adobe, isn't it?
Chizen: That is new (for Adobe). It's something we are sensitive to because we are watching folks like Google do it in different categories and we want to make sure that we are there before they are, in areas of our franchises. And also we have technologies in which to do it. We can take the video-editing expertise of the Premiere team and the Premiere Elements team and marry it with the Flex/Flash programming framework, which meant that we could get that video Remix product out very quickly, more quickly than we could have without Macromedia.
Right now, for photo editing, a lot of people use Google's Picasa. Those people may never become Photoshop or Photoshop Elements users.
Right, and if we offered a host-based version of Photoshop, that's Photoshop branded, that was potentially better than Picasa, you'd probably go the Photoshop route because of your belief in the Photoshop brand and the quality associated with the brand name. That's something that would be obvious for us to do.
The reason why we did video first, is that in video we said that other than Jumpcut, there was really nothing else in the market (like Remix), so why not do it ourselves?
But why wouldn't Adobe do this yourself? Why work with someone like Photobucket?
Chizen: We could do this ourselves (the combined Remix and Photobucket offering). But it's nice to have the distribution channel. It's not exclusive to Photobucket. There is no reason we can't do it with the other social sites or content providers. Imagine some of the people already in the video content business, the media houses -- why they wouldn't want their users to remix videos? We could offer that from Adobe directly, but offering that from Adobe directly means we have to deal with all of the host-based aspects of the business -- the technical operations of collecting the advertising and handling the transactions. That's a pain.
We're giving up some revenue by doing the deal with Photobucket, but they deal with some of the things I don't want to deal with, at least at this point in time. Now, once we see that it could be a significant revenue producer, then maybe we'll want to deal with it.
So where do you stand with a hosted version of Photoshop?
Chizen: It's an obvious place for us to go. There are a lot of online photo editors, so we want it to be deserving of the Photoshop brand. We want it to be a good app. I'd be shocked if we didn't have something in the next three to six months. It would surprise me.
What's surprising is that Photoshop Elements, at $99, is a significant revenue producer for Adobe. Even though you can get Picasa for free, people still want a full-featured product. Not as fully featured as Photoshop, but something in between. So people are buying Photoshop Elements. The question is, what is the demand for a host-based product, how much editing can you really do with a host-based product? Picasa is still a desktop app. So you're talking about a host-based image editor, and you don't want latency to be an issue for the user, so it's harder in some ways than a video Remix product.
The question becomes: how much for a host-only app -- which we think some people will want -- will we be limited (in) the amount of functionality due to bandwidth speeds? Even though bandwidth is increasing, the pipes are getting filled with video, so the user experience will likely stay the same for the next three to five years, I suspect. So is there a scenario where Photoshop Elements gets more hybrid features? Yes. Is there still a need for a host-based image editor? Yes, but it's going to be limiting to some degree.
So what will your Photoshop product lineup look like?
We'll have host-based, free, ad-driven Photoshop Elements with some host-based functionality, Lightroom for organisation, and Photoshop for the serious image editors. And suites with a combination of tools.
What do you see as the most exciting technology coming out of Adobe these days?
Chizen: What's most exciting to me is Apollo. I think we, or someone else, gets to change the landscape of the Web. The way information is displayed on the Web today is kind of archaic. You can't express brand. You can't integrate graphics appropriately. Despite the fact that you have multiple media types, it's not as elegant as a newspaper or a magazine, in terms of look and feel, yet there is so much more capability.
The way information is displayed on the Web today is kind of archaic. You can't express brand. You can't integrate graphics appropriately.
Through Apollo, we get to express that capability through rich Internet apps. That's exciting for the Web; it's exciting for Adobe. It means a lot to our business and to anybody who is creating Internet applications, whether it's a consumer app or a B2B app, B2C app, government app, even internal applications. Something like 61 percent of all information we see gets ignored. That's a lot of information that gets created and dismissed, because we are exposed to too much information. The challenge for anybody who is communicating to anyone has gone up. It needs to look good, interactive, engaging, reliable and secure. We have an opportunity to provide in Apollo all of that.
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