A lot is being written about this today so I’ll just offer two thoughts…
OK so clearly Adobe can pull off a fantastic RIA with tons of functionality – but not tons more than some competitors like Picnik. And what’s with the limited online-photo-sharing-site integration? Px currently offers integration with Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa… What about me, I use Flickr? (maybe I’ve chosen to align myself with a child of a corporate-parent competitor and I’m being punished)
The logical next thought regarding this lightly-featured (lightly by desktop application standards) RIA is: Why would I use this if its so easy to obtain the real Photoshop? Especially if I’m a Flickr user (as I’d be using Picnik)? I believe the answer is : “start kissing easy access to cracked or educational versions of Adobe products goodbye”. Seriously. This is the first step to further siloing power and casual users. Once casual users gets hooked on Px they have no choice but to purchase the new, future, very difficult to crack, very expensive, Adobe Creative Suite. They already do this to some extent with their Photoshop Elements offering – but the problem is that if people are going to go through the trouble of installing an applicaiton, they’ll jsut install the real thing. Bringing the lite version of their software online allows Adobe to further segemnt/partition/silo their user-base.
Illegal/edjucational software useage crackdown to follow in a big way.