Just in time for Google I/O, Google will support the Debian Linux distribution in its Google Compute Engine, which is still in preview mode. From now on, Debian will be the “default image mode” for GCE, according to the Google AppEngine Blog. Google cited Debian’s improved handling of 32/64 bit compatibility as one reason for the move

According to the Thursday blog post:

“Today we’re adding Debian images for Google Compute Engine.  Debian, in collaboration with us, is providing images for both Debian 7.0 “wheezy” and the previous stable release, Debian 6.0 “squeeze.”   This support will make it easy for anyone using Debian today to migrate their workloads onto Compute Engine.”

A Google spokesperson told eWeek  that “customers will get a great experience having a Linux distribution that is maintained by the Debian community. Debian and derivatives thereof (such as Mint and Ubuntu) are among the most popular on the Internet, and Google itself is a heavy contributor to the Debian code base. We will also continue to offer CentOS, and are actively exploring other operating system options based on feedback from our customers.”

Google has a complicated relationship with the open source world. Most of its underpinnings are built on open source software and it does contribute a lot of technology to the community. But its own infrastructure is seen as a black box to many in that community. It’s interesting that there were a grand total of two comments as of Sunday on this blog post — one was removed and the other offered good wishes but added “the thing I’d like to see in future is how community members could be part of this project.”

While Google isn’t saying, folks expect the company will announce general availability of Google Compute Engine, which will compete with Amazon Web Services this week at the big show. GCE was announced last June and the preview was expanded to anyone paying for Gold support last month. Many cloud watchers say GCE, once fully available, will be the second-largest IaaS in terms of capacity after Amazon Web Services or AWS. Microsoft launched its Windows Azure IaaS capabilities in April.

In other words, buckle up, the cloud wars we’ve seen so far, are going to get rougher.

New tool allows AWS management from Microsoft consoles

Speaking of AWS and Microsoft, the new AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center means that a Windows admin at a company — at least one running System Center 2012 — can now use one console to monitor on-premises Windows resources as well as EC2 Linux or Windows instances, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk running on AWS.

As GigaOM PRO analyst Janakiram MSV pointed out in his report Thursday, this move is just one more example of Amazon’s push into the enterprise where  Windows reigns.  He points out that Tom Rizzo, a Microsoft vet, headed up this project at Amazon. Janakiram wrote:

“In 2010, Microsoft launched the Management Pack for Windows Azure deployments making it easier to manage on-premise and cloud infrastructure. Customers running Windows-based workloads on Amazon EC2 had to use a different set of tools based on Amazon CloudWatch, Nagios, OpsView, Nimsoft or other third-party software to monitor their deployments.  Through the AWS Management Pack, Amazon made it easy for enterprise IT teams to manage the servers running within on-premise, Windows Azure and AWS. Microsoft enterprise customers will welcome this.”

Interestingly Rizzo’s AWS blog post does not mention that the console was part of a joint effort with Microsoft, something that Microsoft rectified in it’s post about the news a day later.

Adobe tests the market for all-cloud delivery

Well, my  post on Adobe’s plan to move all updates of Creative Suite to a subscription service characterized it as a low-risk gamble. For Adobe anyway. Well, gauging by reader response,I should have talked to more graphic designers and artists who are fighting mad. Many vowed to stick with their old version as long as possible and then seek other non-Adobe options. Their beef? That even $50 per month per user will end up costing them way more than the current pay-once-use-forever model.

A Change.org petition asking Adobe to rethink its plan had more than 8,500 signatories as of Sunday morning

At any rate, Microsoft ,which has more at stake here than anyone with its zillions of Office users, was quick to weigh in. In short, it says subscription SaaS is the way of the future because it ensures users are always on the latest-and-greatest versions and can use their subscriptions across devices.  But:

” … unlike Adobe, we think people’s shift from packaged software to subscription services will take time. Within a decade, we think everyone will choose to subscribe because the benefits are undeniable. In the meantime, we are committed to offering choice–premier software sold as a package and powerful services sold as a subscription.”

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From Fox Business News; U.S. judge orders Hewlett-Packard to face shareholder lawsuit

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First, the new Creative Cloud subscription version, as GigaOM commenters pointed out, must still be downloaded and installed locally. That makes it different from the traditional Software-as-a-Service model pioneered by Salesforce.com. Such downloads are no mean feat because, depending on the version purchased, the suite includes Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and an array of other products depending on the version purchased. That’s a lot of bits to suck down.

But the difference now is, users must keep paying to use the software — they can’t sit on a six-year old copy of Photoshop. While Adobe said it will continue to support the current Creative Suite 6, all new features and perks will flow to Creative Cloud only.  Sanford Bernstein Senior Analyst Mark Moerdler estimates that 6.2 million of a total 12.8 million Creative Suite users are on aged versions while 4.1 million are on the latest Creative 6 version. And about a half million are using the year-old Creative Cloud, he told me in an interview.

Instead of charging a couple hundred dollars for a packaged product –Creative Suite 6 can “list” for $1899 depending on version, but people who upgrade from any previous version can get it for $600 — the new “cloud” version will cost between $20 and $50 per user per month (again depending on the upgrade). If you do the math, that nets out to be between $240 to  $600 a year. But the move to a subscription won’t be a wash for Adobe: it will be getting its license fees over the course of a year, but it will be getting them as long as the users use the product.

The risk of course is that users without fast broadband links will be left in the cold. And, if users are shelling out money every month, they’re really going to expect valuable feature enhancements and updates to come fast and the update process itself  to be unobtrusive.

Legacy software players — move or die

Adobe has seen its share of woes over the past decade. Apple’s decision to stop supporting Flash hit the company like a ton of bricks. Flash had been nearly ubiquitous in animating web pages and Adobe was working to make it more relevant in the mobile apps world. Apple’s decision to go in another direction with iPhone made that difficult. Adobe “saw its up-and-coming Flash technology, the anchor of much of its design product line a few years ago [get] banned from the most important technology platform to come in decades,” IDC analyst Al Hilwa told me via email.

Then the recession hit Adobe’s high-end and most expensive creative software, as ad and marketing agencies and publishing companies cut spending to the bone. But, in Hilwa’s view, Adobe managed this painful transition well and has made a good start moving its desktop user base to the cloud.

Moerdler is similarly bullish. Adobe, he said, figured it was getting $30 per user per month in revenue now. “So, with Creative Cloud they entice you with a $29.99 first year deal that goes to $49.99 next year for the suite — or for the team version $49.99 per user per month now and $69.99 per user per month later.”

Update: Adobe provided specific pricing for Creative Cloud which is $49.99 per month for annual membership with upgrades from Creative  Suite versions 3 through 5 going for $29.99 per month for the first year and for Creative Suite 6 upgraders it will be $19.99 per month for the first year.

In a research note predating the shut down of packaged software upgrades, Moerdler said Adobe is confident of winning over 4 million Creative Cloud users by 2015.

“Management believes the Creative Cloud will attract subscribers as it offers superior value (frequent updates, low price point, cloud storage, community). In addition, the viral nature of the Creative Cloud, the team edition, and the existing pool of free members will help drive additional subscribers.”

Shift to new delivery model dampens short-term earnings

This transition means Adobe won’t get big one-off license fees paid up front from enterprise customers, but get that revenue instead spread over the course of the software’s useable life span. Smoothing out those payments has actually been the goal for many software companies, including Microsoft, for years. They first tried to even things out via their multi-year enterprise licensing plans and then in their moves to SaaS. Still the transition to subscriptions from lump sum payments means that revenue must be deferred rather than booked all at once. That means growth in online subscriptions can look like sinking earnings, at least in the early stage of the process.

No doubt Adobe has struggled. But it is willing to drop old practices in hopes of finding something that works.

“This is a huge shift and Adobe is walking the talk,” Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang said via email. “More important, they have a disconnected mode, a community and all the tools for the creative class.”

He noted that Adobe has faced increasing competition with freeware but struck back with this new delivery model. “They disrupted themselves when they could,” he said.

The question now is whether Microsoft and other traditional software players — which are hedging their bets between packaged and cloud-based gear — will follow suit.

This story was updated at 11:18 a.m. PST with a more complete price range for the Creative Suite upgrades from Adobe and a link to the Adobe pricing site.

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According to the release, Adobe’s popular desktop tools — Illustrator, PhotoShop, InDesign, Dreamweaver and Premiere Pro — will be rebranded as part of the new Creative Cloud SaaS offering and carry a CC label (e.g. Illustrator becomes IllustratorCC).

For anyone in the media business –including yours truly — this is a huge milestone. Nearly every publication relied on Illustrator to create artwork, and PhotoShop to tweak and touch up (occasionally rebuild) photographs. InDesign contended with Quark as the page layout and production software of choice.

According to a company statement:

“While Creative Suite 6 products will continue to be supported and available for purchase, the company has no plans for future releases of Creative Suite or other CS products. This update to Creative Cloud includes the next generation of Adobe desktop applications — including Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, Dreamweaver CC and Premiere Pro CC.”

Adobe Systems is not facing this cloud dilemma alone. Microsoft is trying to ride the wave while offering Office 365 subscription while continuing to update its legacy Office desktop versions.Who knows how long that will last.

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Through apps mostly available via the Mac App Store, you can decide which components of the software set matter most to you and build up your own custom suite over time to meet your creative needs.  Here are the best alternatives I’ve found that offer similar functionality to what is available in each of Adobe’s products.

Acrobat to SmileOnMyMac’s PDFPen ($59.99, Mac) Possibly one of the best apps on the Mac is PDFPen. Like Apple’s Preview application that comes with OS X, you can annotate and add signatures to your PDF documents. Looking beyond annotations, you can scan documents directly into PDFPen and use its OCR feature on the scanned in text to make the scanned document editable. Being able to edit a PDF document directly, not just annotate it, and saving changes to it as a PDF document is another important feature PDFPen has. Exporting the document to Microsoft Word is a recently added feature that is also very useful. There is a Pro version ($99.99, Mac) that adds the ability to create interactive PDF forms, which allows you to add text fields, check boxes and radio buttons, as well as add submit buttons to your forms.  It is also one of the few apps on this list that has an iOS companion app ($4.99 iPhone, $14.99 iPad) with which you can share your PDF files with your iPad and iPhone via iCloud.

Photoshop to Pixelmator ($14.99, Mac) By now it’s no secret that Pixelmator is one of the favorite apps on OS X for many. When you think of Photoshop, you think more than just applying filters to your images; you want to edit them. With its multilayered support, you can easily touch up and enhance your images with Pixelmator.  Many of the same tools that Photoshop users have become accustomed too are here too, like the smudge, sponge and brush tools.  Pixelmator also comes with some basic vector tools that may be all that you need from a full-featured vector editing tool like Illustrator.  For most of your day-to-day image editing needs, and at the current low price point of $15, it is hard to beat Pixelmator.

Illustrator to Indeeo’s iDraw ($24.99, Mac) If you have not worked with a true vector drawing tool then you have been missing out on being able to make some really crisp and sharp graphics. Indeeo’s iDraw comes with a decent library of shapes to choose from and supports PDF and SVG import/export.  This means that you can import professional shapes from sites like VectorStock and iStockphoto and tailor them to your needs.  For shapes that are not included in iDraw’s library, you will find the pen tool up to the task of drawing your own set of custom shapes.  The gradient editor is more than adequate and you can edit and modify your paths with ease.  About the only feature that is great to have in Illustrator is the ability to automatically trace a path around an existing graphic — an important feature if you happen to inherit a library of graphics that you need to modify and resize to a higher resolution.  iDraw also has an iOS companion app ($8.99 iPad) that can be a useful as well.

InDesign to Belight’s Swift Publisher ($19.99, Mac) When it comes to page layout editors, what you are looking for is one that comes with plenty of pre-defined templates to choose from; this one has 180 different templates.  It also has the ability to create additional templates.  With Swift Publisher, you can create professional-looking brochures, fliers and newsletters.  It has a large clip art library, many different shapes to work with and a decent layer editor that allows you to work with multiple layers within your documents.  It also has some convenient features like the ability to quickly center objects on the page with the touch of a button — something that makes Swift Publisher a better choice as a layout editor over alternatives in the App Store like Apple’s own Pages app.

Premiere to TechSmith’s Camtasia ($99.99, Mac) If you are looking for a quick and easy movie editor, then look no further than iMovie (free, Mac). If you want something a little more full-featured, then consider stepping up to Final Cut Pro X ($299.99 Mac). But if you are looking for a tool that will help you create screen captures then Camtasia is the best tool that will deliver everything you need to make a professional-looking video.  Some of the included features with Camtasia, like the tilt and restore animations, will bring a level of professionalism to your online screencasts.  Besides being a great screen-capturing tool, its included video editing tool is also easy to use.  Definitely consider this one if you are not splicing together a feature film.

Audition to Amadeus Lite ($24.99, Mac) Of course there is Garageband (free, Mac) and LogicPro ($199, Mac), but if you are looking for a something with a simpler user interface for dealing directly with an audio file, then Amadeus is what you need. Zooming in and out and scrolling through an audio file is straightforward.  It even comes with full support for Apple’s Audio Units,  plug-ins that can be used to process audio.  There is a Pro version ($59.99, Mac) that adds multi-track editing, batch processing and some audio repairing features that enable you to remove some of the background noise from your recordings. As a free alternative, you may also and to try out Audacity (free, Mac).

DreamWeaver to Realmac’s RapidWeaver ($79.99, Mac) With the dawn of technologies like WordPress, Drupal and online hosting providers like SquareSpace, the need to create a website from the ground up for many has almost become a forgotten art form.  RapidWeaver includes 45 different themes that you can use to help kickstart your website development without having to learn how to code HTML and CSS.  RapidWeaver has more of a traditional WYSIWYG document editor feel to it than a traditional HTML low-level development tool.  It really picks up where Apple’s now-abandoned iWeb application left off.  Another great alternative to consider when editing HTML and CSS files on the Mac is Tumilt’s HyperEdit ($9.99 Mac) if you are looking for an editor more appealing to developers.

Flash to Aquafadas’ MotionComposer ($149, Mac) While MotionComposer is not available on the Mac App Store, I was able to pick up a license as part of a bundle from MacUpdate and I’m glad I did. This tool brings the same animation effects that you’d get in Apple’s Keynote and helps you publish them on your website.  MotionComposer will create both Flash and HTML5 animations from the same project.  You get to decide which format you want to publish on your site.  It can also integrate your animations into your iBooks Author document.  If you are just looking to add a little animation to your website, then this is the tool to get.  An alternative to Flash in the Mac App Store that you may also want to consider is Tumult’s Hype ($59.99 Mac), it too can output your animations as HTML5.

Provided you have a clear idea of what you are looking for, shopping for individual apps may be a much more economical route to go.  There are times when you are participating as part of a creative team that you must support the input and output formats of the tools your teammates are using.  This is especially true when you must hand off your artwork to a publisher or printer that requires a specific file format. When this is the case, you must purchase the tools that your team supports.

None of these apps listed are complete replacements for such development shops, but these alternatives will get the job done in smaller or one-person creative teams.  And at these prices, each one of these great software titles are definitely worth the investment.

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Scale Venture Partners led the round. Existing investors include Sigma Partners, Altos Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Adobe Systems, which is also a Demandbase customer. Total funding for the seven-year-old company now stands at $44 million.

Demandbase CEO Chris Golec

The San Francisco-based company will use the new money to build out its treasure trove database worldwide, add more sales and marketing muscle, and create new products and features.

GigaOM Pro analyst David Card is impressed with Demandbase. “They’re building a database that translates IP addresses into companies so that you could present content or offers based on who the user likely worked for (which is probably more useful in most B2B situations than recent behavioral tracking or guessing at their demographics),” he said. “They claim to use signals other than IP address, too, and they claim what you can get from the registries isn’t timely.”

The company competes with companies like Neustar or Quova, which also use IP targeting; Bizo, which works in advertising technology by analyzing cookie information; and Gravity, which does personalized marketing. Demandbase would argue that it combines much of this into one service — and it doesn’t use cookies.

Customers include a list of tech players including Dell, Cisco/Webex,HP/Arcsight Informaticaand NetApp.

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ALERT: Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch is leaving the company this week to join Apple, sources tell @jonfortt. $ADBE $AAPL—
  (@CNBC) March 19, 2013

Adobe in a Monday SEC filing revealed that Lynch would leave the company. And in a statement to The Next Web, Adobe confirmed he is leaving March 22 to take the job at Apple.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lynch has been at Adobe since 2005 when the company acquired Macromedia. He is credited with the decision to develop early web publishing software Dreamweaver while at Macromedia.

The move to Apple is tinged with a bit of irony considering the historic bad blood between the two companies. In 2010, Steve Jobs posted his “Thoughts on Flash” regarding Adobe’s technology and its viability for mobile devices. Adobe publicly took exception to Apple’s claims; Lynch himself was a vocal defender of Flash — at one point he said, ”The technology issue Apple has with us is not that our tech doesn’t work, it’s that it does work.” Still, just a couple years later,  Apple decisively won the battle.

This post was updated several times with background and to note Adobe’s confirmation that Lynch is leaving for Apple and his new role. It was also updated at 3:21 p.m. PT to correct that Dreamweaver was web publishing software, not desktop publishing software.

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Powerful editing tools on small-screen devices still to me seem an odd pairing. While I appreciate the ability to make more than cursory edits to a photo on my iPhone, it’s unlikely I’m going to delve too deeply into PS Touch’s feature set on my iPhone. The screen, even on the iPhone 5, it still too small to make editing photos a joy. There aren’t many times I’ve looked at a Samsung Galaxy S screen with envy, but testing out PS Touch was one of them.

While taking a look at PS Touch, I scanned my iPhone’s Camera Roll. It appears I take a lot of pictures of my cat. Hardly the sort of photo that requires a the full might and power of PS Touch. The cat, after all, is pretty much naturally cute. Looking through my Photo Stream, it’s still a lot of pictures of cats, guitars, my friends and my favorite fishing spot. Again, hardly photos I’d want to spend significant time editing. I’m not going to assume my uses are yours, but I think most people’s iPhone photos are more of a photo diary of their life than pictures that need significant rework.

What is has, what it’s missing

Now that I’m done grousing about my Camera Roll, PS Touch for the iPhone does have an impressive feature set. You can create layers, use a variety of selection tools, including magic wand, and apply a host of effects and filters. I had a lot of fun with the filters, especially the charcoal one.

What you can’t do, that I can see, is create masks. I don’t think this is a huge deal on the small screen since I can’t imagine creating masks on the iPhone would be at all fun.What it’s really missing, though, is content-aware healing. Given the fast and loose nature of iPhone photography, being able to remove the guy mooning the camera from a lovely beach shot would be very handy.

Photoshop Touch at times isn’t a very intuitive program. It took me a few times to get how adjusting the tolerance on the magic wand worked, for example. I thought once I had made a selection, I could use the tolerance tool to expand the selection on the screen, but instead it looks like I had to reapply the wand. After playing around with it for a few hours, I had the feeling that there were likely additional features or tools I hadn’t stumbled across. The help area seems to exist largely to check off “create help file” on the project plan.

Once nice feature is you can use Adobe’s Creative Cloud to work on images between your Mac, iPad and iPhone. Again, I can’t see myself doing heavy edits on a photo on my iPhone, but it’s nice to have an easy way of getting images between the three platforms.

PS Touch ran well on my iPhone 5. While it has an impressive feature set, it almost feels like overkill on my iPhone. On my iPad, with the extra screen real estate, a version of Photoshop makes more sense. Some people might complain that it’s not a universal app, but I don’t mind. I think there’s likely enough challenges creating the separate versions to warrant a $4.99 iPhone price, with the iPad version being $9.99. And, hey, a Photoshop for $15 for both platforms seems almost like a deal with strings attached.

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The companies didn’t release terms of the deal. Behance, founded in 2006 and now with 32 employees, has 1 million users and hosts 3 million projects. Earlier this year Behance raised a $6.5 million round from Union Square Ventures, along with angels Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Path founder Dave Morin, designer Yves Behar, 500 Startups’ Dave McClure, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp, Chris Dixon, and Dave Tisch.

The move is the latest example of how tech companies are now finally seeing the value of good designers and the importance of good design. And importantly, how they are looking at ways to tap into the designer community. Sand Hill Road investors are looking for the latest designer founders — like the AirBnB folks — and are launching design incubator programs and funds. Startups like Pinterest, Nest, Flipboard and Path are developing apps and products that use design as their core value.

We think the trend is so strong — and not going anywhere any time soon — that we have an annual event called RoadMap (#roadmapconf) that looks at connected design. RoadMap 2012 featured a who’s who of designer tech leaders like Yves Behar, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann, Tumblr CEO David Karp, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, Nest founder Tony Fadell and many more. Later in 2013, we’ll unveil our lineup and location for RoadMap 2013.

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