“Shit the beach-ball!” I exclaimed. “I ‘got it too”, I heard from across the studio.
We might as well brew a pot of coffee – we’ll be here a while.
Adobe has made great strides in recent years to eliminate application crashes in their Mac suite of applications. Remember running CS/CS2 in Rosetta and Illustrator simply shutting off when you used the pathfinder – and viola you’re back at the desktop and out an hour of work because you forgot to Apple-S? Ya well Adobe on Macs is about where it was on PCs under CS1 – your machine will think really hard for a really long time – you may lose fidelity in your OS GUI – meaning some panels will go white and not refresh until Adobe is done thinking – but 99 times out of 100, if you wait long enough, the application will recover.
Back to the studio…
(speaking in a sarcastic tone) “Dude, I can’t wait for CS4” I hear from the guy sitting next to me. “Can you say application bloat?” he says.
Mmm. Application bloat? I don’t know about anyone else, but I feel like I actually use 90% of the functionality built into Photoshop. I’m in Photoshop every day, all day, and only leave the application to perform more specialized vector tasks in Illustrator or to work in Flash – something I’m doing increasingly less of as I specialize more as a Visual Design Project Lead. So is the software bloated? Maybe for some – but then again maybe not.
Microsoft has been encountering this feature-set critical-mass issue for quite a while. On one hand their engineers (and marketing folks no doubt) keep finding new (and sometimes) useful features to add to the considerable list of capability MS Office already offers. Aside from being a reason to shell out for another upgrade round, these new features and interface paradigms (Office 2007 toolbar ribbon) are sometimes a useful and welcome addition to modernize their software offering, but they come at a hefty price. Lots of overhead is needed to do seemingly simple things like WRITE A DOCUMENT. It is for this reason buzzword (Adobe’s web-top document writer) and Google docs have gained so much traction.
Are there lessons that Adobe can learn from the Microsoft analogy? Yes, but first let’s look at where Adobe is with their software offering. Right now Adobe controls the media pipeline from content creation to the delivery on your computer screen. And soon we will be getting AIR for mobile phones which (should) deliver a similar level of content richness to your mobile as exists on your computer. Adobe also runs the show in the print world, owning font libraries, post script profiles and color calibration configurations that are industry standard. Professional video is a slightly different animal, but for the prosumer segment Adobe After Effects is THE motion graphics software of choice. About the only software Adobe doesn’t own the authoritative voice on is nonlinear video editing (people seem to still like Final Cut over Priemere). Adobe’s move to CS4 also marks an unprecedented level of 3D control in their applications – an actual 3D software offering is only a software-generation or two away. So adding features and risking “bloat” is clearly in Adobe’s foreseeable future. But how should Adobe manage that risk going forward?
With so much computing functionality going into the cloud, hardware and software are becoming more specialized. Right now the appliance model is taking hold for mostly mobile usage. Net-books and Mobile Internet Devices are defining a whole new model of computing on-the-go. On the flip-side gaming rigs are a consistent hot-seller. What’s left out is the content creation segment. We’re (I’m a content creator) all supposed to choose from the one-size-fits-all Macs, Dells, HPs and others for the machines we spend most of our waking hours interfacing with. But that’s all about to change with Adobe’s move (in CS4) to take advantage of GPU bandwidth to accelerate the UI responsiveness of their applications. This move will mark a shift for content creators to demand their own specialized computing appliances, machines markedly different than the generalist machines sold to suits and the general public. It used to be RAM and CPU that differentiated one content-creation box form another. Now we’ve added the graphics pipeline/subsystem to core hardware points of differentiation from one computing experience to another. I’m reminded of the SGI boxes of the late ‘90s that were THE price of entry for 3D animators to adequately perform their trade. Are we next in line for the appliance-computer model to make a comeback?
I think so – if Adobe thought of their application suite as something of an OS. And I think it wold be a good move on Adobe’s part to embrace this course correction because it will address the looming beast of software bloat – it will be Adobe’s way of enacting a certain degree of “bloat-control”. Here’s how.
Remember Mac OS 7/8/9? Remember when the OS booted up you would see certain extensions that the OS initialized for use (they looked like puzzle pieces on the loading screen)? Why isn’t every panel in the Adobe UI loaded on an as-needed basis? Whether a camera in After Effects or a vector manipulation filter in Illustrator, at a certain point the core of the Adobe content creation UI model is a canvas, tool palettes and a timeline. I’ve often thought about why I need to go from Photoshop to Illustrator to get a line with a stroke on it for an incomplete, non-closed vector shape. Unless I’m missing a very obvious technique in photoshop, if I want to create a bezier curve and apply a stroke to it I can’t do that in Photoshop – even though I can create a complete vector shape in photoshop and have my choice of stroke options. With the Adobe OS, what I’m describing is a very small footprint application base and the ability to load functionality/modules on an as-needed basis.
To understand why this does not happen we need to look back to my Photoshop example. If Adobe made Photoshop too feature-packed it would cannibalize Illustrator sales. And if Illustrator had pagination it would be InDesign and there would be no need to sell that either. The disaggregated software experience worked for Adobe – up ‘till now. Adobe’s software offering is growing so robust, and their control of the content creation pipeline so complete, that they need to look to another model for what the future will look like precisely because there no longer exists a sensible explanation for why Photoshop does not allow me to create a non-closed vector shape with a stroke – other than software bloat. Enter the case for an aggregated experience – with a twist.
Invoking the cloud computing model once again we see Sales Force making quite a profit form the metered Software as Service/Platform as Service (SaS/PaS) model. Can Adobe do the same? Imagine the Adobe footprint/OS as a (relatively) low cost software that bootstraps the ability to use other Adobe content creation modules at a metered rate – let’s say yearly for instance – with an integrated way to dynamically load modules from the cloud, as needed/wanted to your local machine through a subscription service. As a content creator I benefit because only loading the modules I’m going to use at that time (if I’m animating in Flash I do not need 3D cameras from After Effects loaded) saves me from beach-balls (on a Mac) and allows me to create content appropriate in proportion to the power of the rig I’m using (laptop vs. desktop/on the road vs. in my studio). As a software vendor Adobe wins because they get a constant stream of revenue from subscribers and they allow for a la carte customization of their software environment which fosters a sense of personalization and responsiveness to a user’s need (good for PR). Not to mention the benefits of instant software upgrades and all user’s working off the same version of their applications.
This is where the appliance computer model really comes into focus. Adobe could team up with hardware manufacturers to create specialized rigs sold for certain uses – the way they package their industry-specific software suites today. Or they can start to manufacture their own – heck I’m in Adobe software literally all day and only escape it for email/web browsing – both take place in a browser. Why do I need anything else other than the Adobe OS? Either way, I hate the beach-ball in OSX (Save for Web kill anyone else other than me? I thought so), I hate having to purchase three different softwares (and have them running simultaneously) when I use one 90% and the other two 5% each and software bloat I hate the most. The aggregated approach/Adobe OS solves all three while making good business sense for both Adobe and the consumer.