Adobe is a company that doesn’t like losing market share and missing out on new opportunities. That’s why it’s no surprise that they’ve announced an online version of their immensely popular photo editing program, Adobe Photoshop.

Avid readers of this site probably remember my recent roundup of online photo editors, and while I cannot predict the death of all these applications, I must say that an online Photoshop is a great threat to them. It is the de facto industry standard for photo/image editing, and while the mentioned applications - especially Picnik and Pixenate aren’t bad at all, they don’t have the advantage of being able to use Photoshop’s exact interface. Even if Adobe messes up on this one and produces an application that’s buggy, overly complex or lacks features, people will till be inclined to use it because of their familiarity with this interface.

This shows a big peril for many online applications that aren’t community based and are basically just online version of already existing desktop application, and if I were an investor I’d think twice before investing in such a product. The company that already has a very popular desktop product can always choose to add an online counterpart, and your business as an independent online application might be going down the drain very fast.