Adobe recently announced its plans to offer a free, online version of its popular image manipulation program, Photoshop. The service should be available by the fourth quarter of this year, and will be part of an every growing effort of numerous companies to get as many applications as possible off of the local machine and online.

With Google’s recent introduction of Apps Premier, a comprehensive suite of applications designed to assist in day to day office productivity, it is becoming quite apparent that many companies believe that future products should be highly Internet driven, if not entirely Internet based. With this announcement, Adobe wants to make sure that it is the first to have a quality image manipulator on the Net, before others, like Google, have the chance to beat them to it. It would be embarrassing to say the least for Adobe to beat at what is essentially their own game by a company that primary focuses on advertisements and Internet searches. Ironically, the way Adobe wants to make money off of this new service is to offer ads, presumably Google ads.

If Adobe does pull through with its plans for an online version of Photoshop, it would have to compete with similar products already being offered. One of these would-be competitors includes Picasa, an image organizer with some basic editing options, which is in its second iteration and also owned by Google. Although Picasa still needs to be run locally, it does include a lot of features, like image sharing and printing, that rely heavily on the use of the Internet.

The challenge for Adobe is going to be to design a product that will actually offer the features that people have come to expect from Photoshop, while mitigating the effects of Internet latency and the annoyance of advertisements.

With the gradual expansion of Internet bandwidth and compatible devices, it should be very interesting to see to what extent consumers will be willing to have their programs online. The case for web-based e-mail is easily made, but that same case is a lot harder to make for office applications and image editors. Internet apps generally have to put up with latency issues and downtime, which make them very hard to implement in a large scale business environment. Not only that, but the general contention is that Internet applications are a lot less secure than local desktop applications, which is not very comforting to a lot of privacy minded users. However, in all likelihood, the average consumer will make use of both Internet and locally driven applications, and the integration between these two will enhance the overall experience for many.