Photoshop at 25: A Thriving Chameleon Adapts to an Instagram World - NYTimes.com
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“When I took over the business in 2010, I realized that the growth in our business did not match what was happening all around us,” said David Wadhwani, the executive in charge of Adobe’s creative software. “Visual expression was on the rise everywhere. Our business was a solid business, but it was not growing at the pace that we felt it should.”
So Adobe is taking a big risk and reinventing Photoshop and, the company hopes, making it less acutely dependent on sales to a small group of professional customers.
The aggressive reinvention of Photoshop, if successful, could serve as a model for other companies, particularly Microsoft, that risk losing business to more nimble app makers. It also suggests a path to mobile devices for software that over the years grew fatter as PCs grew more powerful: Slice it up, cut the price, and you could end up attracting a far wider audience.
Or at least make sure your current audience doesn’t abandon you.
State of the Art
Adobe’s new plan for Photoshop actually started in 2011. Rather than selling licensed copies of Photoshop and its other high-end creative applications for hundreds of dollars each (Photoshop used to sell for $700 a copy), Adobe began offering monthly access for as little as $10 a month.
“But we were always watching the trends to see exactly what features were required as the market evolved,” Thomas Knoll said. Each time some new opportunity came along — from the web to inkjet printers to digital cameras — Adobe quickly tuned Photoshop to the new technology. Each time, Photoshop grew.
In a way, then, Adobe’s turn to cloud-based subscriptions and mobile apps is similar: The business of software has changed, and Adobe is again shifting with it. Adobe now offers some of Photoshop’s best features to outside developers, who can add advanced image-editing capabilities to their apps at no cost. Adobe is also building a suite of apps that offer specific cuts of Photoshop and other programs to a wider range of users.
“When I see all this happening, I’m down with what they’re doing,” said Mr. Maeda, who is now a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “I think the younger generation of designers is looking for new tools, and they don’t care what device it’s on.”