Drifting Towards “The Cloud”

Possession, it would seem, is no longer 9/10s of the law.  We’re all drifting ever closer towards “The Cloud” – the gradual shift from personal, physical ownership of computer resources to having someone else remotely own and provide these services to you, on demand, over the Internet.

At its Scottish Partner Briefing session in Edinburgh yesterday, Scott Dodds, Peter Ferry and others clearly and unambiguously set out Microsoft’s Cloud Vision, under the tag “We’re all in”:

We're all in

The premise (or should that be off-premise?) for Microsoft is clear.  Many of its corporate customers find its sometimes convoluted on-premise licensing model confusing and overly complex.  Add to this the fact that Microsoft does not directly manage the vast majority of its small and mid-market customers (devolving this responsibility to its Partner Network).  As a direct result, Microsoft currently estimates that it is missing out on potentially as much as 40% of the licensing revenue due to it from its corporate customers. 

So, the cloud-based subscription model, theoretically, allows Microsoft to realise 100% of licensing revenue.  It’s a well-furrowed path which has already been well exploited by the likes of Salesforce.com.  

But it’s not necessarily going to be an easy sell.  Microsoft will face resistance from in-house corporate IT departments, who will not fail to notice that outsourcing to Microsoft the provision of the service which they have (until now) provided represents a pretty significant threat to their job security.

Then there’s the frequently-raised concerns over security of confidential information, privacy and data goverance.

But perhaps most fundamental of all is the paradigm shift from personal ownership.  If we move this from the corporate space to the consumer environment, there is something extremely re-assuring about physical ownership – having what you hold, and holding what you have.  As a music fan, I’ve only recently come to terms with the switch from CDs to storing all my music on iTunes.  OK, I can no longer touch my CDs, but at least I’ve got my physical music files under my immediate control. 

You’ll note that the previous sentence contained 3 ‘my’s.

In a musical sense, the introduction of services such as Spotify and Last.fm begins to shift this essence of ownership away from the self, and into the hands of third parties.  I’m sure it won’t be long before the notion of physical ownership of MP3 files becomes a quaint old throwback to the days of yore.  Instead, all we’ll own is our own, personal playlists – with the physical files themselves held by the likes of Spotify, Last.fm, et al.

Microsoft contends that the shift is already happening.  In the consumer marketplace, it already offers a range of cloud-based services, and all are well used:

• Hotmail has 369 million users worldwide;
• Windows Live has 500 million active ids;
• Bing serves out 3 billion queries per month;
• MSN has 600 million unique users; and
• XBox Live has 20 million subscribers.

If we look at the Corporate marketplace, according to Microsoft, 20 million businesses are already using Microsoft Cloud Services, and this figure is only set to grow. 

Perhaps in this post recession(?), credit-conscious world which we now live in, the most compelling reason for businesses to buy Cloud-based services instead of on-premise services is the move from CapEx to OpEx to meet the cost of their IT needs.  With Capital becoming ever more valued, the ‘pay as you go’ or ‘burn as you earn’ model becomes increasingly attractive to businesses.  It provides the flexibility to cope with peaks and troughs in demand and to throttle back costs when there is a low level of demand for their service.

Whichever way this plays out, one thing is certain – we’re set for a gradual change.  Microsoft views it as a “multi year journey from legacy to cloud”.  And whilst it continues to push Cloud-based solutions to the marketplace, Microsoft won’t forsake those customers whose preference remains for on-premise licensing.  It will continue to service this marketplace as well.

The Lampards – That Missing Demo Tape

Once upon a time, I was in a band.  I played the bass for a time.  We wrote some pretty decent music for a bunch of sixth-form school kids, trying to pretend we were The Charlatans, at the height of the 1989/1990 Madchester scene.

We were called The Lampards – in homage to West Ham’s bearded former full-back, at a time when his son, Chelsea’s current midfield golden boy was still in short trousers.   OK, so he still is in short trousers most of the time, but you get the idea.

The Frank Lampard

We sent  the demo tapes to the late, great, John Peel.  He liked them, or so he said.  We tried to get a record deal.  We never quite made it, but had lots of fun trying.

I lost one of the master demo tapes.  And now, some 20 odd years (!!!!) later I’ve unearthed it in a dusty old cardboard box.  And thanks to the wonders of modern technology, there’s now no need for that record deal – the songs can be published online.

The Lampards

So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Lampards:

• Left to Burn
• Space 516
• Stop You Flying
• A Bad Sorrow

Matt – I’ll give you the demo cassette the next time I see you.  For now you’ll have to make do with these MP3s on your iPod.  Sorry for ‘mislaying’ it for all these years.

Maybe if we’d sent that one to John Peel, things would have turned out differently.

To Hear Knows When?

It’s amazing who you bump into in the most unlikely places. 

I was on the way home from a family holiday in Portugal yesterday.  Whilst waiting in a queue at Faro airport to drop off our kids’ car-seats at Outsize Baggage, who should sidle up next to me?  None other than Colm Ó Cíosóig, the drummer of My Bloody Valentine.

Who indeed?  I hear some of you ask.

For those of you who may not know, My Bloody Valentine are one of the founding forebears of the Indie music scene, and remain one of the seminal reference points in the genre for today’s alternative music pups.  They are also, quite possibly, one of the finest bands ever to exist in the history of music.  Colm is the sticksman.  He’s mild mannered and softly spoken, unassuming and inconspicuous amongst the crowds at Faro airport. But when he gets on stage he makes Animal, the drummer in the Muppets, look positively tame, such is the way he flails around his drum kit at high velocity.

And on the drums ...

Colm

My Bloody Valentine had played a gig at the Rock One Festival in Portimao the night before, and Colm was on his way back home to Dublin.  Somewhat disappointingly, Colm wasn’t trying to get his whole drum kit through outsize baggage.  That would have surely been the last straw for the increasingly frustrated and frazzled Portuguese desk clerk who was single-handedly trying to manage a queue of about 60 travellers and their accompanying odd-shaped objects.  Instead, Colm had an enormous, but otherwise fairly ordinary, holdall to check in.

I couldn’t resist the opportunity to engage Colm in conversation.  I asked him about the hotly awaited next My Bloody Valentine album. 

For the uninitiated, the last MBV album (‘Loveless’) was released in 1991, having taken 3 years to record, reportedly bankrupting the Creation record label (which launched the careers of the likes of Oasis and Primal Scream) in the process.  The gradual disintegration of the band followed, over a number of years.  Whilst MBV are not exactly renowned for being prolific songwriters, when they unexpectedly reformed in 2007 there was much talk about a new album.  Since then nothing substantive has materialised.

Colm’s response to the question on the new album was “I don’t know anything about that”.   Perhaps a stock response from a member of a band who have always been quite secretive and media-shy?  However, he was certainly convincing on the subject, continuing to say that apart from a few live performances with MBV, all his time was being spent on “other projects”. 

It would seem to make sense – in an age when recording new material is expensive but doesn’t yield the financial return which once it might have, more and more bands are using live performances (and merchandise) as the vehicles to make it work commercially.  Why should MBV be any different, particularly if it allows them to fund other projects which won’t necessarily have the same kind of lucrative potential as two-dozen MBV gigs each year?

So, there you have it.  Hot off the press, the message to all you MBV fans out there who are itching to get their headphones around some new material – don’t hold your breath.  To Hear Knows When?  It could be another 18 years before they get round to releasing the next album.  They may never get round to it at all.   Still, it was nice to meet Colm.