IDGNS: Do you offer any of your packaged software products in full-featured but hosted versions?

Chizen: No, we don't.

IDGNS: Will there come a time when your full-featured products will be offered as a hosted SaaS (software-as-a-service) model?

Chizen: Yes, but over time. To benefit from a full-featured version of Photoshop, the experience as a hosted application wouldn't be very good, and that's because of bandwidth speeds. The capability of broadband doesn't equate to what you can get from your local computer.

You'll see us do hybrid applications that take advantage of the desktop, but where appropriate, we'll provide hosted functionality for things like sharing. Our Kuler [web-hosted application] lets people collaborate using different color settings, [and works in conjunction with] producs like Illustrator, which resides on the desktop.

That's going to happen over the next number of years: We'll have these hybrid environments for full-featured applications. As broadband gets greater and greater, there's the possibility of taking the desktop app and moving it to the host. Five years is probably the minimum.

But the capability of the desktop and laptop is advancing so quickly ... and broadband capability isn't increasing that rapidly. Even if it increased that rapidly, people are throwing more data into the pipes, which will slow down the delivery of the information.

IDGNS: So you're seeing interest from users in hosted software that simplifies workgroup collaboration?

Chizen: For more casual users, we'll have hosted services. We announced a service recently called Share [in beta version], which lets you extend what Acrobat does or what the Adobe Reader does -- document sharing, PDF creation, word processing -- which will all be hosted, but you're still going to want to do a lot of things on your desktop.

IDGNS: Do you agree the future of software delivery is that SaaS/hosted model?

Chizen: Eventually. The key is how long does that take. It depends on the application and on broadband capabilities. I'm smart enough to say that will be in 20 years probably.

[Chizen later said during his presentation at the conference that he foresaw the Adobe software delivery model changing from packaged applications to SaaS about 10 years from now.]

IDGNS: Does the SaaS/hosted model also present a threat to Adobe if stealthy competitors develop from the ground up as hosted software and offer some credible competitors to Adobe packaged applications?

Chizen: Any shift of delivery model or business model is a threat to any company like Adobe that makes a lot of their revenue selling desktop software. It's up to us to make sure that as the environment is capable of delivering functionality to users, that Adobe is there before anyone else.

What we've done in video editing with Premiere Express, what we're doing with Photoshop Express with Share, what we do today with PDF creation online are great examples of Adobe being ahead of others in taking advantage of the changing landscape.

IDGNS: When did Adobe develop a sense of urgency for reacting to the SaaS trend?

Chizen: Back in the first dot-com wave is when we became sensitive to it, and we developed Create PDF Online. I'd say it was a little over two years ago when we got a sense of urgency around it. Our first major hosted application was the Acrobat Connect real-time conferencing product.

IDGNS: You're in the process of acquiring Virtual Ubiquity, maker of the Buzzword hosted word processing application. Are you interested in having hosted spreadsheet and presentation applications and forming an office productivity suite?