Photoshop-As-A-Service

A year ago, ITWire wrote a story about Adobe moving into the SaaS market with a free, entry-level version of photoshop… within six months.
That version of Photoshop launched yesterday. Dubbed Adobe Photoshop Express to distinguish it from the desktop-based Adobe Photoshop Elements, the service is much like Picasa or Picnik, and in fact, despite Photoshop’s “pro” reputation, may actually contain fewer features than Picasa or Picnik.
Still, an “online Photoshop” has been heavily hyped for quite a while, especially among Slashdot’s Linux-heavy crowd, who come in two camps: Those who bemoan the lack of a native Photoshop for Linux, and those who think the first group should just use the GIMP and be done with it.
But there are a few things that stood out: The first was that Adobe’s EULA is written so that, if you should upload your photos to the “publicly accessible areas” of the Photoshop Express service, while you retain copyright, Adobe gets a “worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license” to use the photos in any way they see fit.
This may cause any company with concerns in intellectual property or data security – which is all of them – to start going over EULAs for their SaaS solutions with a fine toothed comb.
It is also a bit of a milestone for SaaS, as Photoshop is the Adobe Systems flagship brand and flagship product, a household name of desktop software. Adobe’s moves in that direction are not to be ignored; and we’ve talked about the importance of maintaining network performance even when using SAAS solutions.
The release of Photoshop may bolster those, like Nick Carr, who believe that, fundamentally, IT is obsolete, and the trend is that all software will move from the desktop to “the cloud.”
I happen to think that there’s nothing to fear.