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Will Mr. Google Rustle the Adobe Cash Cow

I think most buisness intelligence write ups are dull. Corporate catastrophes can be fun! Just ask Bain, Boston Consulting Group, and other blue chip firms. I want to give you a glimpse of another Google disruption that is not in the “Sergey and Larry eat pizza books.” The informaton in this write up comes from open sources. The difference between this analysis of a single Google invention and telling anecdotes about advertising is that the Google is poised to put some major pain a some large outfits in a business sector not generally associated with Google. In this article, I refer to Google as Mr. Google and Googzilla. I find that making light of what may be one of the more significant capabiliteis of this company is fun for me. Enjoy. Oh, if you are annoyed by my writing style, may I remind you that this is my personal Web log and it available to you for free. Therefore, don’t write to complain about my approach, just go read something more appetizing to you.

Any one remember Andrew Herzfeld? Earlier this year, the New York Times pointed out that Andrew Hertzfeld, “who helped develop the original Maacintosh and now works at Google” that Mr. Google was looking for different cash cows. Graphical interfaces and related software wizardry are nothing new to Mr. Google. But Mr. Hertzfeld is a bit like Vint Cerf or Jeff Dean. These are humans with brains that dwarf the addled goose’s pitable gray matter. Mr. Hertzfeld is a wizard. In addition to the Macintosh work, he founded General Magic and then Eazel in 1999. He donned his Google T shirt in 2005. Not exactly an average Googler, but you get the idea that Mr. Hertzfeld has some graphics savvy amidst the Haskell crowd.

So, what’s Mr. Hertzfeld doing at Googzilla’s magic factory? Picasa? An in-browser image editor? I don’t know much, but I do know how to look at certain types of open source information. A recent example is US Patent 7631252, filed in July 2006. The title is “Selective Image Editing in a Browser”. To give you some context for Mr. Hertzfeld’s interests, he has a patent called “Graphical User Interface for Navigating btween Levels Displaying Hallway and Room Metaphors.” After looking at these two documents, my hunch is that the Google wants to visit the feedlot where Adobe’s cash cow Photoshop is getting fat.

You can read these documents and draw your own conclusion, but I am going to snap this invention into my Google capabilities matrix under “Graphics Disruption”. Hey, I am an addled goose, so those folks with image editing systems that run on the desktop or in the cloud can tell me I am off base. No problemo.

But, just for fun, let’s look at what the crystal clear prose of US7631252 tries to communicate.

Here’s the abstract:

Methods, tools, and systems are provided for editing an image in a browser. One method provides editing an image in a browser including maintaining a list of transformations applied to the image including a last transformation, receiving a selection from a user to rollback a transformation, the selection not including the last transformation, generating a unique identifier associated with the edited image without the selection and requesting a page using the unique identifier.

Not too exciting, right?

Now Mr. Google employs a junior poobah named Cyrus. This bright lad insists that I create illustrations for my books and lectures using Photoshop. The reason for this interesting assertion is that Cyrus does not read patent documents. Here’s a Google illustration that supports the patent:

If you know about online image editing, you can figure out that the simplified interface supports a number of controls. The feature seems to be that behind the “simple” facade are some Photoshop-like functions.

What makes the patent interesting to me is that Mr. Google is supporting some computationally intensive and storage gobbling functions. Browser based roll back is one example.

The other aspect of the invention that I noted was that there is some smart software clanking around in the background. One quick example is the auto recognition capability that invokes certain functions. Mr. Google provides 21 claims for this invention. Most of these till earth that other image editing outfits have trampled into hard packed clay. A couple of them are going to allow Mr. Google to exert some disruptive forces in the image editing markets.

To put this in some perspective, Mr. Google has a vector capability. Mr. Google has a bitmap editing capability. Mr. Google has a plan for something. I wonder if there is a confection called the “creative sweet” in Mr. Google’s candy shop.

Stephen E. Arnold, December 18, 2009

Oyez, oyez, I want to report to the Jet Propulsion Lab that I was not paid to write about this invention, the Googler who does not read patents, or the coming pressure for the kids from Adobe. I would like to get paid for this type of serious patent analysis. I won’t even get a lump of coal for Christmas.

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