According to reports, Adobe Systems plans to release a free hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within the next few months.
Adobe, whose business is built largely around packaged software that is installed locally on users computers, is looking to diversify its business with online services.
This would be a somewhat stripped down, ad supported version of photoshop with some basic image manipulation tools; kind of a kid brother to the more complete Adobe Photoshop Elements and the upcoming full Photoshop CS3 package.
This is most likely an attempt to keep up with Google and it's offering of free online web applications. Adobe plans to make the hosted Photoshop version comprehensive enough to compete with Google's popular Picasa image gallery/editing application.
Adobe has already ventured into online applications. They recently launched
Remix, a new web-based video editing tool that will be provided free to all Photobucket members. The company already offers
Acrobat Connect, a service for Web conferencing introduced with the most recent release of its Acrobat PDF reader.
Inital response to the announcement has been mixed from what I've seen but I guess we'll wait a a few monthsw to see how well Adobe does as it brings Photoshop into the webware arena.
