Do you remember when Adobe Creative Cloud was announced (and released) in 2011? It was unmistakably a huge step towards the future that would lead to what I refer to the 2010s as the “Subscription-Craze” decade. With tons of subscription-based services like Netflix and Pandora, or the more recent, Disney+, Peacock (from NBCUniversal), and HBO MAX, it is clear we live in a subscription-based society now. Becoming the norm, it allows for companies to drive lower costs for the masses. For the case of Creative Cloud however, it is more than just keeping what normally would cost thousands of dollars, to a minimum; it allows the developers at Adobe to maintain the programs by constantly rolling out updates. This is definitely a win for users, as it allows the consumer to own the most recent version of Adobe’s programs, while also not breaking the bank.
Aside from Creative Cloud being able to sustain lower costs for almost a decade now, there is one main feature that is the selling point of Adobe Creative Cloud, and it’s so simple you might not have even realized it (it’s in the name.) That’s right, the whole premise of Adobe Creative Cloud is, well, the “Cloud” feature.
And while millions of users utilize this program within their everyday workflow, there is one giant leap towards the future that Adobe has not yet released. A feature that might already be in the works and will redefine Adobe’s industry as a whole. That is, if it isn’t added too late in the game.
On, March 9, 2006, Google released its first, cloud-based writing processor. Formerly known as Writely, (an online-based writing processor, programmed and developed by Sam Schillace, Steve Newman and Claudia Carpenter) Google Docs instantly became ahead of its time. And although Microsoft Word was considered to be the monopoly within the word-processing software industry, Google managed to separate itself from its competitors.
What was their selling point? Not only was Google Docs free for everyone, but it also offered the most innovative feature a software could have. Real-time collaborative editing.
Now, let’s return back to Adobe’s program lineup. Imagine you need to work on some designs with a colleague, so you open Photoshop and you send an invite link to the new document with them and begin working on a shared document. Or you have a new video to edit together on Premiere Pro, so you share your .pproj file over to your editor, and in real-time make the cuts, all while they are working on color grading them. That is intuitive.
You may be wondering how this could work? Well, Adobe CC already offers storage onto the cloud. The only step the user needs to make before editing, is uploading the proper assets to their respective Adobe Cloud storage (Adobe can even offer higher storage limits to better accommodate this feature.)
It is also important to note that Adobe already allows users to work together on projects, but it lacks the seamless and real-time functionality. Adobe XD now offers a “Coediting” feature (beta) so it seems likely that these are the testing grounds before implementing “Coediting” onto the rest of the Creative Cloud programs.
Now that I’ve completely road-mapped Adobe’s inevitable future, I think it would be nice to see how far along a program such as Photoshop has come, in its 30 years of existence, here is The History and Evolution of Adobe Photoshop.
