The Creative Cloud subscription service from Adobe allows users to pay a monthly fee to have access to one or every available product. This ranges from Photoshop, to Illustrator, to After Effects, to Audition, to Dreamweaver. This one subscription follows you, via your Adobe account, through every platform… that they support. Currently, that's Mac and Windows.

To expand that, they are now experimenting with a streaming service, bringing Photoshop to Chrome.

How it works is simple: send Currently, it is limited to Google Chrome on Windows and ChromeOS. Also, the servers do not currently support GPU-acceleration, but Adobe has already announced plans for that in the future. I assume that when this is a consumer product, or shortly thereafter, it will be a fully-featured application. Who knows, maybe they will even bring the rest of their products there? "Streaming access to Photoshop with other products coming soon" …

People may remember that I was very much against services like OnLive and Gaikai. These do the same thing as Adobe, but for video games. Being an outspoken (to the say least) supporter of art, I found this to be an unacceptable sacrifice for intrinsically valuable content. It is a terrible idea to allow a service to pull your content and replace it, especially for scholarly review in the future.

This is different. While I would always prefer a local application, and would be upset if they stopped offering those, I do not mind having a utility be served from a virtualized instance. If I was working on serious, trade-secret-level content, then I would want to avoid it. On the other hand, getting it to work in one web browser might encourage them to bring the service to all browsers.

From there, Linux and other platforms might just have a valid way to access Adobe's Suite.