Adobe unveils Adobe Creative Cloud, Photoshop Touch and five other tablet apps
Update: We go hands on with new Adobe Touch Apps! — Adobe Photoshop Touch and five other new iPad apps from Adobe will land on the App Store soon, coming to Android devices in November.
Context & Ripple Effects
The tablet Photoshop tease is now a product line: CNET reported back in November 2010 that Photoshop for tablets was looming, and at this week's MAX conference Adobe has turned that into six shipping apps — Photoshop Touch plus five companions — headed to the iPad App Store first and Android in November.
The apps are the visible edge of a bigger repositioning unveiled by CTO Kevin Lynch at MAX: the Adobe Creative Cloud, alongside the completed Typekit acquisition and same-day releases of Flash Player 11 and AIR 3. Notably, Adobe scheduled its reveal for the same Tuesday morning as Apple's long-awaited iPhone 5 unveiling — a deliberate head-to-head with its most important platform partner.
First-order effects
- iPad owners get Photoshop Touch and five companion creative apps on the App Store within weeks, with Android tablets following in November — the first time Adobe's flagship editing brand runs natively on either platform.
- Creative Cloud becomes Adobe's stated umbrella for its services, absorbing Typekit's web-font business and tying the new tablet apps to a hosted offering rather than standalone purchases.
Second-order effects
- Apple and Google both gain a marquee creative-software win for their tablet ecosystems, and Adobe's simultaneous iOS-and-November-Android rollout forces each platform to court Adobe rather than treat tablet apps as exclusive differentiators.
- Rival creative-tool vendors now face a competitor bundling desktop, tablet, and web-font services under one cloud subscription, pressuring them to answer with service bundles of their own instead of per-license sales.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, professional creative software migrates from boxed, versioned licenses to cloud subscriptions that span desktop and tablet — with Adobe using its own conference cadence, not OS vendors' schedules, to set the pace.
- Tablets begin shifting in industry perception from consumption devices to legitimate production tools, since the category's defining creative application now ships on them.
The trend: Creative software is moving from desktop licenses to cloud-connected subscriptions that follow the user across tablets, with Adobe's MAX announcements marking its first full step onto iPad and Android.