JOIN USPhotoshop adapts to a new world
The history of digital technology is full of innovations that are praised for having changed the world: the Mac, Microsoft Windows, the Netscape Navigator browser, the iPod and countless others. Then there are the many products that changed the world and were suddenly overtaken by some newer, supposedly better thing: the Mac, Microsoft Windows, Netscape Navigator, the iPod and countless others.
What’s rarer in tech is the product that causes major changes, hits turbulence and then, after some nimble adjustment, finds a surprising new audience.
Last week was the 25th birthday of one such aging chameleon, Adobe Photoshop, an image-editing program that was created when we snapped pictures on film and displayed them on paper. It has not just survived but thrived through every major technological transition in its lifetime: the rise of the Web, the decline of print publishing, the rise and fall of home printing and the supernova of digital photography.
Photoshop attained the rare status of a product that became a verb - like Google and Xerox. Along the way, it became a lightning rod for controversy because of, among other things, the way it can be used to turn women’s bodies into unnatural magazine-cover icons, or its use by propagandists and your casually mendacious social-networking buddies who doctor their vacation snaps.
But now, for all its cultural cachet, Photoshop risks missing out on a far larger market of casual photo bugs and their smartphones. Once, for better or worse, we Photoshopped photos. Now, more often than not, we Instagram or Snapchat them, and everyone, it seems, is a photo editor. But not everyone needs or even wants a fancy program like Photoshop.
“When I took over the business in 2010, I realised 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.
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 or Rs 43,494 a copy), Adobe began offering monthly access for as little as $10 (Rs 620) a month.
The price change was initially met with fury from loyalists, who didn’t like the idea of renting rather than buying. Because subscription revenue comes in over time, the change also took a toll on Adobe’s bottom line. Its annual net income declined 65 percent in 2013, and it fell 13 percent last year.
But the company sees the decline as the short-term cost of a long-term plan. By lowering the price of Photoshop, Adobe hopes to democratize access, gaining new users who, in the past, wouldn’t have been able to afford $700 (Rs 43,494) software.
The trend looks promising. Adobe now has 3.5 million subscribers to its Creative Cloud suite of apps (which includes Photoshop), and it expects to have nearly 6 million by the end of this year. Annual revenue generated by those subscriptions will approach $3 billion. It’s on track to beat the record $3.4 billion that Adobe made from selling boxed software in 2011.
There are risks, of course. Low-end photo editing apps are becoming popular - fast. Adobe may not be reacting quickly enough to them. And when you reach out to new types of customers, you could offend the old ones who supported the business for decades. Will they find a high-end alternative if Photoshop starts looking a little too downscale? Still, the company is forging ahead.
Adobe also has grander plans to break up Photoshop into a number of apps, some of which it will make itself. Others will be made by third-party developers who will have access to Adobe’s image-processing systems online. In some cases, those apps will even be free.
“The goal is to go from tens of millions of people benefiting from the technology within Photoshop to hundreds of millions of people over the years,” Wadhwani said.
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 John Maeda 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.”