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This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Hilton. Restaurant or room service, what would the boss do? Either way, the boss would choose Hilton Hotels and Resorts to get down to business and a little pleasure. Check out Hilton Hotels and Resorts. Travel like the boss. Hey, everybody. It's Neelai from The Vergecast. This week's interview episode is with Scott Belsky from Adobe. He's Adobe's Chief Product Officer in charge of Creative Cloud, and Adobe just put out Photoshop CC for the iPad. It's the full code base of Photoshop on the iPad. It's taken them forever to do it. They finally made the move. We actually got an early preview of it. We've had it for a week before the announcement. Dammy Lee, one of our tech reporters and an excellent webcomic artist, has been using it for a week. You can look at that video on the site. Dammy and I sat down with Scott. We talked about why they decided to put Photoshop on the iPad now,
how it's going to be different and where it's going next. It's a really interesting interview that gets, I would say, a little bit philosophical and a little bit weird. I think you're going to like it. Check it out.
Okay, we're here with Scott Belsky, who is the Chief Product Officer at Adobe. He oversees all of Creative Cloud. Thanks for joining us, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
And I actually, I brought Dammy Lee, one of our reporters, who actually is good at using Photoshop and Illustrator, unlike me.
Oh, I mean, I've been using it for a while, but I think with Photoshop, it's something that you kind of learn over time. And it's like, just so many features on it that it can take like years, I think, to just master like everything.
Yeah.
It's endlessly rewarding.
Which is both a great and somewhat challenging thing for new users as well.
Right.
It's certainly true.
So, speaking of Photoshop, Scott, you have really exciting news this week. You announced at MAX, which is your conference, that Photoshop is coming to the iPad, which at once feels like now is exactly the right time. Apple's got the pencil, they got iPad Pros. They're talking about new iPad Pros. And then also super overdue. So where do you, where do you think that lands on the spectrum of chronology?
Well, I have a lot of personal history on this topic. My last tenure at Adobe, after Adobe acquired Behance, which is a company that I founded many years ago, I also took on responsibility overseeing the mobile products organization, which at the point when we were, you know, starting this up in, say, 2013, 2014, there was not much there. And the goal, of course, was always to bring our iconic products like Photoshop to mobile products as well as iPads and Android devices and that sort of thing. And we embarked on a process to do that. But even the thought of porting something like Photoshop to a mobile device was almost laughable at that time. And instead, the teams were thinking, okay, how do we bring some of the features that
people would want to do on a product like Photoshop to mobile? How do we maybe allow you to push a file that is compatible with a Photoshop desktop-like product? And there were a number of explorations. And I remember at the launch of iPad Pro for Apple, one of my team members was in the keynote. We had worked and continue to work really closely with Apple now. But at this time, we were really proud to launch a few different Photoshop branded products on the iPad Pro. It was an exciting keynote and we shared it. And then at the end, an Apple executive came up to me and said, this is great. Thanks for working with us, but when's Photoshop going to come to iPad? And I was just like, ah, you know, we just had this huge launch and we're so excited about what we're pushing out in the world.
But he was saying something that everyone else, including our team, was thinking, which is what if you could really have native Photoshop, like the real thing? And in order to do that, there are, now I'll fast forward through a couple of years worth of exploration, deep in the labs at Adobe, of how can we take this 25-plus-year code base and make it as if not more efficient? And it turns out, actually, Photoshop on iPad is even faster in some instances than anything you'd see on the desktop. How do we really make sure that it's the core engine of Photoshop? It's not some proxy or hybrid or it's the real thing? And therefore, how can you have truly compatible Photoshop experiences across every surface? And that's really what we set out to do at that point, knowing it would be years away.
And today was the day.
Why specifically now? Have you had a calendar on the wall and you're waiting for some event? There's a new GPU in the A12 processor or whatever? Or was it, we finally just had enough time to finish it? What was the precipitating?
There were a lot of, I mean, clearly the stars have to align for a product like Like Photoshop, which is really the creative world's creativity application. It's just capable of anything to really come to an entirely new platform. There are things that had to happen on the hardware side. You know, that's where our partnership with Apple really came in here as well as on the software side and the full stack of what Photoshop was underneath the hood. And also an entirely new imagination of the UI and the experience for the modern customer. Right now, you know, we talked about just as we kicked off how how hard it is to learn Photoshop and how people are really proud once they learn the product over years of using it. But at this point, people say they want to Photoshop something and they come in and they want to accomplish really powerful things very quickly.
And so this was also an opportunity for the team to take a step back and say, how do we have a new approach to the user experience of this product? And you see that with what we demoed, you know, at Max and what will ship later in 2019.
So just to be clear for the listener, Photoshop on the iPad is not, it's not the desktop app running on an iPad, which would be amazing and incredible, but it is not that thing. It is a new interface.
Yep.
And so I'm a big fan of Lightroom CC, which was last year at Max UNES Lightroom.
As am I.
And you've got, you've got Lightroom Classic, which is the big full feature desktop application. And then you've got CC, which is sort of a scoped down version of Lightroom that's growing into.
Yeah, I would say it's the modernized clouds, cloud first product. The way I like to look at it is if Adobe created Lightroom today, knowing everything it knows about cloud workflows, working across surfaces, wanting it to be accessible, Adobe would have created Lightroom CC. Lightroom Classic is a product that some of the greatest photographers in the world use and swear by and have deeply entrenched workflows. And so as a team, we said, you know, we can't just kill that and create this modern product, even though there's a whole new generation of folks who want this different experience. And that's why we have both Lightroom Classic as well as Lightroom CC.
So that metaphor is that how people should understand Photoshop on the iPad? Or is it the same Photoshop?
It's a bit of a different metaphor because we don't have the new version of Photoshop that will come to iPad in 2019 that we showed off at Macs. That is not also coming to the desktop as a different version of Photoshop, right? So there's still Photoshop across every surface and there is one Photoshop for each surf, one Photoshop experience. The way I think about it is that Photoshop has stopped being a product, a desktop product, and it's become a system. And so when you create something on Photoshop on desktop, you can actually see it on iPad and pick up where you left off. And there's so many actually interesting workflows around retouching, around just small edits on the run, people that want, you know, are on doing photo shoots. There's so many instances where customers just want Photoshop quickly with their fingers
or their pencil as opposed to loading it up on the desktop. And so that's really what this product was created to do.
How much are you leaning into the pencil? Is this a stylus-driven product?
We're really excited about the pencil because it's, I think that you'll see the importance and capabilities of this accessory grow over time. We do collaborate with Apple a lot on this and I have to be careful about what we can say. All I can say is that it's a-
No, it's just us, uh, come on, what do you got?
It's an important part of using the product on iPad. I really believe that it will, and it will grow in importance because it's part of a new interface, right? And when you have a group of designers and engineers who are creating the next generation of Photoshop, when you give them that creative surface to use in addition to touch, it opens up more creativity, more possibilities.
Yeah, but do you think people are going to use Photoshop on the iPad without the pencil? Like, is that something that you're really thinking about? Or do you think it, this is-
For sure. I think that they will. I use it myself and so I, I think that in some ways the pencil will help some power workflows and it will augment some workflows to make them more efficient. I don't think it's required to use the product on the device.
So tell us a little bit about the sort of development story here. Was this- You convened a meeting of your leadership and said, I must have Photoshop and go forth. Or was it a Skunk Works project? What's the background here?
The story that you'd hear from the team is a period of exploration where some people doubted it and some people were just kind of head in like, we're going to figure this out. And there was just a lot of doubt until what we called the proof of life moment, where we actually had real Photoshop code with an entirely different, of course, stripped down MVP interface running on an iPad device. And then you go through the process where you show that to people and they kind of don't believe it. They're like, come on, like, what is this? What's really running here? And then they see the dot PSD at the top and they're like, oh. And then you kind of pinch in and you see the immediate down to the pixel level zoom experience. And then you're like, wait a second, are those layers? Real layers? And they're like, really, really layers?
And I saw that a lot as we socialized this proof of life experience around the company. And then it opens up a whole series of questions like, oh, if this is real Photoshop, what should the interface be? Should we reimagine it completely? Should it be a derivation of what people know and love today? Something in the middle? What sorts of things should we question? The practices that have... I mean, there's a lot of stuff about Photoshop that made a lot more sense 10 years ago than it does today. When you scale an image, the fact that it doesn't scale by default, both height and width, right? And there's just a bunch of things that, the way Ctrl+Z works, there's a lot of stuff in Photoshop that, and we're making improvements on the desktop application as well to modernize. But when you have an opportunity to build a new experience of Photoshop from the ground
up, you get to question every assumption that's been made over the last few decades. That was an exciting and exhilarating experience for the team. And then what we showed today at Max is the first generation of what we think is the future of Photoshop.
So I'm sure you've had a lot of input from artists and designers who have tested out a beta version of Photoshop. So what is some of the feedback that you've gotten from, like, real artists?
Right. So people still don't believe it at first. Strangely, I've sat through some of these and watched some of these videos with customers and people are like, this is a real, this is my PSD from the one that's in Dropbox? People are trying to figure that out. Then I think it's this notion of when you have it on you, you just start to, at times in your day, just start to do stuff. And you realize like the novelty and... The utility of having something of this power like at your fingertips. To me, it validates kind of the overarching thesis we have here, which is that creativity should not be chained to the desktop. That is a archaic notion of the history of computing, but not human creativity.
What we know about human creativity is it happens wherever you get inspired. It happens at idle time. It happens at three in the morning next to your bed. It happens, in fact, it doesn't really happen on command for many of us. And so the idea of having the power and accessibility of a product like this with everyone wherever they are, I think will unlock a lot of potential. We saw that with some early users that we were testing this with is that they just started to, you know, use it on bus rides and trains, on photo shoots, like on the job and locations and stuff like that. Otherwise, they would have always said to themselves, oh, I have to like, when I get back to my desktop, at that desk time, I'll do it.
So if you were to prioritize some of like the biggest features in the iPad version of Photoshop, because, you know, I'm sure you've had to like start with making some compromises and like trying to prioritize what features that users would need the most. Is there a list of features that the team decided like you have to have this?
When it comes to prioritizing features for a V1 product, you know, we really tried to look at it from the standpoint of what workflows do we want in this V1 experience? And the team looked at all the different functions of Photoshop, right? So there's the painting and drawing, there's the compositing, there's the image editing, there's the retouching. And we tried to then boil those major verticals of use down to core workflows. And then let's make sure that we have every feature that supports some of those workflows for our power customers as well as the new folks that come in. So I know that things like retouching, compositing, a lot of those core image editing workflows were the priority for our V1 of Photoshop on iPad, you know, that will hit in 2019.
And then we have a few others that we're still working on and bringing some of the features to support, but don't have all like some of the digital painting and drawing things and a few others. The other thing that I really challenged the team to do for this V1 One is think about the accessibility and onboarding and first time user experience of Photoshop for new customers because the desktop product, there are so many people every year who download it because they want to Photoshop something. They feel empowered with this product. They open it and then it's like, what do I do next? And as we started saying, it takes a career to really learn exactly like the full potential of the product. And so with this V1, you actually see some real innovation around the first mile experience of Photoshop as well.
So do you think you're going to capture new users on iPad? You're gonna get, I know, mom and dad open in Photoshop on the iPad and they're gonna
I sure hope so.
Graphic designers?
This is, this is our, our hope and mission as a company is to bring creativity to all. One of the internal mantras I always cite to our teams is let's build products that are powerful enough for professionals, but accessible to everyone. And that's the challenge. Like, that's the, the bar we want to reach. It's really hard to do that, as you know, because when you simplify things, then power users are like, where is the power? But if you can, through progressive disclosure, you know, not showing everything at once, but showing what you need, when you need it, when you're using a product, educating folks if they want it, but otherwise getting out of the way. There are a lot of design practices that we can bring to make this product more accessible to more folks. But as a personal in this test, I want my parents to be excited about Photoshop on iPad and I want the, the folks that are just wanting to be
creative with their images. I mean, think about how much of social media and visual communication these days comes down to imagery. And, and yes, there's like simple filters and things you can apply with camera apps and photo apps these days. But with Photoshop, I mean, you can really make anything to make that more accessible to the average creative person in this world, you know, at a time where creativity is our most uniquely human trait, right? And, and everyone needs, it's like a form of literacy. I think it's important.
So I'm gonna ask you an insanely philosophical question, but I just want you to go with.
Oh, yes. Let's do it. All right.
So you, you said, you said just now, work doesn't just happen at the desktop, right? Creativity doesn't happen at the desktop and you're bringing it to the iPad and you know, Apple seems to be in this moment, the industry seems to be in this moment. Our executive editor, Dieter Bone, is always making videos about what, what is a computer? Like, what is this thing that we're using? How does, how does it fit into our lives? Is it a tablet that can dock into a keyboard and has a stylus? Is it a laptop? Is it actually just your phone? Photoshop for the longest time has been a definitional product of what is a professional creative user do on a computer, right? And now it seems like you're democratizing that. You're talking a lot about making it more accessible. What do you think a computer is?
Well, that was philosophical.
Yeah, it's the Vergecast, man.
You warned me. No, that's great. At its best, a computer in this modern day is an extension of us. It's something that doesn't have friction in terms of getting from a thought to an action, but it actually just almost makes it frictionless and seamless. And I mean, you think about the power of voice these days. Why are people so excited about voice? I mean, obviously, there's mouse and mice and keypads and there's so many ways of interacting with an interface. Why is everyone so excited about voice? I think it's because it just makes it even closer to us. It makes actions a more natural extension of the human experience. And so when you think about a product like Photoshop, the accessibility and the simplicity
we're talking about is not just for new customers or people who aren't professionals. It's also for really seasoned professionals that want to do more, accomplish more faster. Also, another question I get often is around artificial intelligence and whether with AI we're going to replace creativity or computers will be creative. And I totally disagree. I actually think what AI does is it allows, it kills all this mundane repetitive stuff that creative people do every day to get their ideas from their minds out. And it in some ways removes the friction of visual expression. As a consequence, there will be more creativity happening. It will happen faster and there'll be less mundane stuff that's just getting in the way.
And so if you ask me what a computer is this, this modern day, I think it's what allows us to express ourselves and take action with less friction.
Okay, so I have two follow up questions. One continues to be philosophical. The other one, you opened the door to me asking the most tedious mundane questions. So just get ready for that one. But the first one is, are you gonna bring it to a phone? That is literally the most personal computer you have. You have it all the time. In many cases, it's a great imaging device. Is your next step to bring Photoshop to a phone?
I would want to. Nothing to announce today.
I'm just gonna tell the listener, we can see Scott on video. He's grinning his face off because he's not answering that question.
No, I mean, listen, I think that we already have some Photoshop branded apps on the phone that are not the real codebase of Photoshop with the level of parity that we just discussed on iPad. But I would want to get there, just like we're getting there and just announced with iPad. And the reason is because if people want to Photoshop something wherever they are, they should be able to. And they shouldn't have compromise in terms of the power and capabilities, just dependent on the platform they're on. I would love to have Photoshop on every surface at some point. It's frickin' hard. It's not gonna happen overnight. But I think it's all about empowering creative people to do their work on their own terms is always a litmus test for how we determine where products should go.
So here's my mundane and tedious question. When I think about Photoshop, again, I'm not good at it. And maybe Donnie can follow up because she's actually good at it. But I think about file management, right? You're gonna composite images together. You need two image files. You make a PSD. Then you have a PSD. You're saying you're gonna edit PSDs. iOS is not known for being a great file management platform. Like, there's Dropbox, there's Files App, there's your own cloud service. How are you handling that problem? Because it's like the first problem to solve.
Yeah, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the era of the file is over.
Oh, wow.
I think that a creation is really a combination of components, right? It's, look at a Photoshop, quote unquote, "file." What is it really? It's a collection of fonts and images and layers of edits and other things taken in from other places, composited together. It's a collection. And all those components, those ingredients of that composition, still exists in their original form, as well as their combined altered form, which is ultimately the composition you're making in a PSD. And so what we've done, and this is, by the way, what powers Photoshop on iPad, is what we called the "cloud PSD." And the cloud PSD is, in a sense, like a manifest of all of these ingredients together.
Not to get too technical, but you asked a mundane question.
No, I want you to be as technical as possible. No, this is important.
Do it.
Underneath the hood, right? This is a manifest of all the components that you sourced from original sources and then altered into this composition. That is what you visually see in Photoshop on iPad and Photoshop on desktop when you open it. And so another thing that we announced alongside this is the, first of all, the existence of the cloud PSD and the fact that cloud PSDs, when we ship Photoshop on iPad, will also run and automatically show up on your desktop product. And so suddenly you'll have this cloud-powered round-trip experience akin to like a Google Docs experience where literally you're the source of truth of your Photoshop creation is in the cloud and it allows us to do all kinds of fun things, right? Because all these ingredients, again, are there, they're in their original form, their altered form.
And so you can always sort of go back in history, you can share it and have other people be able to go back and undo things you did. I mean, there's so much potential unlocked and we take this new model. Now then you asked about files. So one of the things that we're going to have to overcome is our obsession with the organization of files in the desktop file folder format. We have a lot of customers who live by that. And I think that we're finding some creative ways of helping bridge people over to this new world. But in order to have a multi-surface, first-class experience of a product like Photoshop, you do need to abandon the constraints of the traditional file system.
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So, very practical questions. Is this going to work if you don't have a network connection? Because you're talking about all the truth being in the cloud.
Yes. So what we do is we, again, to get a little technical here, but we store everything you've done in cash, right? On the client's side, on your device. And so you can do a lot. In fact, you can have a full workflow with either a new file or something you've been working on locally. And we keep most of your recent documents in cache. And so you'll have that flexibility. I mean, we certainly do not want people to have the most creative moment of their lives at 30,000 feet and then realize, ah, you know, "Go, go, and you're not letting me Photoshop, right?" You don't want that.
Literally, GoGo has killed most of the creative moments of my life. I'm going to be honest with you. And then second, very practical question. You mentioned Dropbox earlier, but it sounds like cloud PSD is your service. Do these files work across if I have OneDrive or Dropbox or whatever? Or is this you're paying a subscription to Adobe for the Adobe Creative Cloud? And this all comes along for the ride?
Well, I mean, I should say that every cloud PSD obviously can be saved as any of the formats you'd want, including a traditional PSD file that you can then email to someone or store in a cloud storage place or whatever. The way I'm thinking about it is really like from the customer centric view. If you are creating something on one device and you want to go to another. I mean, we just want to make that seamless. We want to eliminate the need for people to make copies of things and have, you know, one version here and forked another version here. And all that kind of stuff gets a little messy in any creative workflow. But that also puts the onus on us to figure out great ways for teams and individuals to collaborate with each other and maybe sometimes have renditions of files in different places just to have like an organization around some of the madness.
And there's a lot of these things which we're exploring and frankly, still exploring, even though we announced Photoshop is coming to iPad. But I mean, these are the right questions and we want to just make it. We want to have the right solution for customers and their workflow. And you know, and the hardest part of any technology company and product leader is to decide the somewhat unnatural things you force now because you know it's the future. As opposed to the, you know, the things that you just continue to accommodate because of the past. And in Adobe, as a product leader, I have that problem in spades because we have a lot of incredible power users of our products who have been using our products for years, if not decades. And they have very established workflows that we need to respect. And yet, at the same time, we can't leave the new generations behind it.
We can't deprecate the power of our products because of the, you know, accommodations. So it's always a balance, which is why you see things like Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC and some decisions that others, you know, scratch their heads at. We're just trying to do the best thing for our customer and we're constantly having that debate internally, for better or for worse.
You said you have this problem in spades. What is, what would you say is the emblematic product bet that you've made with Photoshop on iPad?
I think one of them is the cloud PSD format. So that discussion we just had, I mean, you can imagine the PSD is an iconic file format. It's like a repository of creativity in every single file on people's. Drives, right? And they use traditional cloud storage products and yet, and then here we are saying, actually, we're going to rethink this whole architecture. And there are consequences, certainly for how customers are accustomed to organizing all of their different files and stuff. And we're just saying the future of creativity is not bound to the desktop. Therefore, it cannot be bound to the file format in traditional sense. Therefore, it needs to live in the cloud. Therefore, you know, and it's just a logic sequence that there are certainly very valid arguments
against us making this move. My attitude is if Adobe were to be founded today, you know, and wanted to empower the world's creatives to do their greatest work, like, what would we do? Obviously, we would have a, an infrastructure like this modern one. And yet, we have to be very careful and have really easy on boardings and bridges for our customers that are really akin to the desktop workflows and want to leverage this new surface. I mean, we've also made that very easy as well, which I think is the right balance to, to achieve.
So, speaking personally, as an artist who kind of prefers working on the desktop over the iPad, and there's like a lot of reasons for that, but I think one of the biggest hurdles for like a regular user, not like a power user or Photoshop, is probably pricing. Like, there's not a lot of apps in the app store that go beyond, I'd say, like, pro creators at most, like $10. And do you guys have a plan for how like Photoshop on the iPad will be priced? Will it be subscription based? Do Creative Cloud subscribers get access to it for free? Do you have sort of a plan on that?
Yeah, so we haven't announced any like pricing for the product, other than to say that if you're a paid Creative Cloud customer using Photoshop on desktop, you'll get this system upgrade, if you will, as part of that subscription. So, because that's our philosophy, right? Is we want you to be successful across multiple services. And that should be something that you expect with Creative Cloud. I mean, it is called Creative Cloud, after all. So that is, you know, that is something, and I think that the question we haven't answered yet is, but is there a mobile product plan or whatever else? We don't have anything that we've determined on that front yet. My hope is that, you know, you say you're a desktop accustomed creative. And what I have to say is that we've seen some folks, you know, early testers,
when they have this product on their lap and they open a huge like gigabyte plus PSD file that they had worked on on their desktop for a long time and then they just open on their lap and then they have this like speed and you know flexibility around what they're doing and moving around and zooming in and out or whatever, you do get like a, there is like a light up in their, in their eyes. So I, I'll have to see how you feel, you know, to get that sensation.
Like personally, it's just the learning curve for me. I mean, it was hard enough to learn Photoshop on the desktop over like several years and the experience of opening up a new app and like trying to figure out like where all your tools are is overwhelming at sometimes, but I think, well, I kind of polled our The Verge like creative art team on their thoughts on Photoshop and immediately, one of the first questions was, okay, well, when is Illustrator coming out? So we're all getting ahead of ourselves here. And yeah, I guess that's my next question. Like, do you have plans to bring other desktop apps to the iPad?
I certainly want to bring more of the, you know, the suite of creative products to iPad. I mean, the vision that I'm pushing within the company right now is that every product should be a multi-surface system. But first things first, I mean, Photoshop, just to get it to where it needs to be, as I've already explained, you know, has been quite a journey. And I think we're also going to learn a lot as customers start to really push the pedal to the metal on this product and see what's capable, what they're capable of with it and what works and what doesn't work. So we'll see. But my hope is that we do what customers need, right? So if Illustrator's have really great use cases for this, I think that, you know, there should be products that support them in this multi-surface way as well.
So you keep saying surface, so I'm going to ask you about the surface.
Yeah, yeah.
So that's a really interesting comparison in terms of a product, right? So you've brought Photoshop to the iPad, you've rethought the UI, you've built the cloud PSD, you've made all these affordances for Apple's platform and what it can enable you. And then you've got Microsoft's platform, which is literally a Windows PC that you can touch. And that just runs desktop Photoshop. And some people really like that. And that might be what they even have wanted on the iPad. Are you thinking, well, hey, there's all these touch-enabled Windows PCs, we should, we should bolt this fancy new touch interface onto those as well?
That's a good question.
He's smiling again for the audience in their cars. Scott's grinning once again.
Man, I gotta stop showing visual expressions and just like, look plain and boring. No, you're talking my language here. I mean, when you see the new UI of a product like Photoshop on iPad, immediately you start to wonder, well, can some of these innovations around UI and like improvements to user experience come into other touch surfaces of Photoshop like Microsoft and on their Surface product? And I mean, the short answer is the team's exploring it, of course. And we're always trying to modernize our desktop experience. And the fact that we get touched for free, so to speak, on some Microsoft devices is exciting to the team. The other thing I want to just quickly address, because you talked about how the daunting feeling of learning a new UI, and you spent so much time learning Photoshop,
and now it's like another UI of Photoshop. What I should say is that, because I, you know, I have the voices of my design team leaders in my head saying, Scott, please share with me, please share with Verge, like what we went through in this process as well. The teams felt very passionately about not having this like friction when you see a new UI. Like, the common discussion was capitalizing on familiarity. So what are the iconic experiences and the tools? And like, what are the things that people expect? What are the visual cues that we need to carry on and be consistent, not only how they look, but where they're placed? So that you, just out of reflex, know where to go for certain things. And so you will see a lot of that in Photoshop on iPad as well. Like, that was something that we took seriously. And even though we wanted to modernize and
rethink things, we also wanted to respect a lot of these really established patterns that work for creatives.
So, I don't know, my instinct with you is to ask you these like wild philosophical questions, because you have good answers to them. But Adobe famously changed the entire model of Creative Cloud, right? Once upon a time, you'd buy Photoshop 4, and then you'd buy Photoshop 5, and there were years in between. Now you are Creative Cloud, it's a subscription software service, it updates all the time, it's great. Do you think that huge shift in model gives you the ability to release a new version of Photoshop like Photoshop for iPad? Because that core Creative Cloud customer base will just go along for the ride, because they perceive it to be free? Or do you think the real action here is you're gonna put it in the App Store at 20 bucks, and mom and dad are gonna buy one thing, and then maybe realize that they want, oh, man, I really want Illustrator on the desktop?
I can't imagine my mom saying that. That'd be incredible. Do you think that you, the subscription model gives you affordance to take a risk of your bets? Basically?
Well, I mean, what the subscription model does is it allows us to deliver things to customers faster. It allows us to experiment. It allows us to also look at the gamut of customer needs and say, hey, I mean, from a business perspective, the more we satisfy our customers' needs and the more value we deliver, the happier our customers are and the more valuable the subscription. And obviously, if customers are happy with a subscription, they continue to be customers. And so that's the thing with, I just don't think we would be doing things like Photoshop on iPad and a lot of other things we're doing had it not been for the subscription transition in our business model. Think about fonts, you know, and Adobe Typekit, which we announced that Max is now Adobe Fonts, which is a much more streamlined service for fonts wherever you are, whenever you need them.
I mean, that's another example of something we just took and said, there's so much friction around font management for customers. And what if we just leverage the fact that we have a subscription to just make this so much easier for folks? One other example of a product I love that no one ever talks about, which is called Adobe Capture. So this is a mobile app on Android and iPhone, and you literally can capture a font that you like, a color, a shape, a brush, even a texture. You can capture it with this incredible technology from our labs that literally takes that, puts it into the Creative Cloud library that you see in every product you use on desktop and of course, soon on mobile. And it's like, that would only be possible if you had a subscription service where that's, it's a quote unquote free product because you're capturing things and then you're using them
in the products that you have as part of your Creative Cloud subscription. So I think the answer is the subscription model has unlocked all this. And I don't know why the company would, you know, would charge a fee for a download, like selling a product in the App Store as opposed to saying, hey, when you're a subscriber, this is something that you get that adds value to your experience of Creative Cloud.
Yeah, I think that that shift, particularly in mobile software, is at once, I think in one community, talked about a lot, and I think in the sort of broader world, completely unremarked upon. In that the entire business you're running has changed. It seems like maybe one of the things that let you do Photoshop on the iPad and not feel the pressure of it needs to be perfectly aligned with Photoshop on the desktop is because it does seem like a value add instead of an entirely new product.
And you see this with Lightroom and the Lightroom franchise. One thing that has fascinated me is how much use from our customers is on Lightroom CC on mobile and on iPad and on Android, of course. There's such a... There are customers who started the Lightroom on desktop and then they just started to get into the mobile product, which I think is especially good. And then they're using mobile mostly. And why should we care as a company? I mean, they're a Creative Cloud subscriber. We should meet them where they are and let them do what they want to do where they want to do it. And that's the beauty of the model.
You mentioned Android. Every time you mention a new platform, I'm just going to ask you if Photoshop is coming to that platform. This is where we are. Are you thinking about bringing it to Android? Is there even an Android product that excites you the way the iPad on the surface would excite you to bring Photoshop to?
Well, Android is a very exciting platform. I mean, it's massive. And the other thing that I'm passionate about is creatives outside of the US and also in developing countries where you may not even have a landline connection, but you have a mobile phone with a fast connection. And don't you want to do retouching? Don't you... I mean, I actually know the economy of creatives around the world who are participating from a mobile experience. So it's something that we're certainly focused on. We already have a number of products on Android and we hope to bring more.
All right. My last... Here's my last question for you. At what point do you think Photoshop on iPad will replace and your personal use will take over from the desktop? Is it now? Do you see your personal roadmap for you?
I know you're looking for a controversial answer, but what I will tell you is that the truth is, is this really workflow by workflow. So there are some workflows that we have nailed down, like, for example, a simple retouching workflow. From my experience using the early, early version of this new product that we just shared, I don't see why I would go to the desktop, frankly, to do a retouching type of workflow of this magnitude. It's powerful, it's somewhat faster, and it's super easy, and it's native with a touch experience as opposed to a cursor, in my opinion. So that's one example of one workflow that has sort of been... Probably more mobile than desktop for me.
After this product hits. And I think there's others. And of course, over the roadmap, there will be more and more and more. And I think it's going to end up becoming a hybrid experience. People are going to, with their creative brains, have an affinity towards different platforms or surfaces for different types of work. And the beauty of it with Creative Cloud and the cloud PSD and the innovations there is that you can just pick up where you left off and you don't have to even, you can be somewhat agnostic.
I love it. I have all kinds of questions about the death of Wacom, but we'll get there next time. But Scott, thank you so much. I know we've run overtime. That was a great conversation and I think we're all excited to play with Photoshop on iPad.
I enjoyed it. Thanks, guys.
Thanks so much. All right, that was Scott Belsky from Adobe. It was a really fun interview. I'm just going to start asking everybody what they think a computer is and see if they have an answer. I really want to know what you all think of these interview episodes and who you want us to interview. Let me know. You can tweet at me, I'm at Reckless. We'll be back later this week with the regular Vergecast.
This episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by Merck. Now, a word from Merck.
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Hey, everybody. Last thing, Kara Swisher at Recode has a new podcast called Pivot with Scott Galloway. They talk about what's happening in startups and tech, what's going to change, what's happening next. Check out a little bit of that right now.
Hey, Vergecast listeners. This is Kara Swisher, editor-at-large of Recode.
And I'm Scott Galloway. I teach marketing at NYU Stern School of Business.
And we're here to tell you about our new podcast together called Pivot, where we unleash our hot takes, provocations, and predictions about tech and business. We'll also talk about who's screwing up. Spoiler alert, that's a lot of people. So therefore, we obviously talked about Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and some others.
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