Online Photoshop is a mistake

Why is Adobe set on offering a dumbed-down online version of Photoshop? The main appeal for Photoshop has always been derived from a rich and powerful desktop user experience that will be near impossible to replicate in a web app. How do you create a 20MB proof online?

The answer, of course, is that Adobe is trying to go after a much larger consumer space as they see a growing interest in simple editing and remixing tools across online photo and video sharing services. But I still don’t get how this is Photoshop. It would seem to make more sense for them to pursue strategic partnerships (like the one with PhotoBucket) or launch a new product line of simple web embeddable widgets versus this dumbing down of Photoshop.

Photoshop can indeed benefit from integration with the web but not like this. One of the problems people have with Photoshop files is sharing them with others as they can be very big and not everyone has Photoshop. I can see Photoshop greatly benefiting from a p2web model where users can share their photoshop files with anyone directly from their desktop but over a browser. That way a client, for instance, can view and use simple browser based annotation tools to markup a proof that a designer is sharing from their desktop. The designer can immediately view these revisions in their Photoshop (as a revision layer), incorporate the changes and republish a new version to the client. Now, this would be a killer app aimed at their creative target market that would greatly simplify the iterative design cycle.