Cloudy Weather

by Chris Gledhill, Managing Director, PDMS

Clouds are very much on my mind at present and I’m not just talking about the weather, appalling though this summer has been! In geek speak ‘the cloud’ is a universal metaphor for any aspect of computing or communications which is provided as a service usually via the Internet. This covers anything from Skype to the BBC iPlayer via Google apps and Facebook.

One way or another the major players in the IT, entertainment and communications world are fighting for control of the cloud. Some established players like Sky, and to some extent Microsoft, are threatened by the concept of on demand services through the open Internet (as opposed to their own networks) whilst others such as Google and the BBC (also pretty well established!) are setting the pace in delivering services and products from the cloud.

Sky is one of my pet hates at present, to be fair we have to give them some credit for changing the way many of us consume TV with Sky+ but its half a job at best! Why, for example, do I have a computer with a hard disk connected to my TV, because that’s what a Sky box is, yet it can’t talk to my wireless network or copy recorded files to my PC without playing them back long hand. Combine this with what can only be regarded as monopoly pricing and… Well let’s hope we get some credible alternatives some time soon.

The BBC meanwhile has shaken things up a bit with the launch of their iPlayer system. This lets you download programs you have missed directly from the Internet to be played back at your leisure. Ironically James Murdoch of News Corporation (aka Sky) criticised the BBC's on-demand service at the Marketing Society's annual lecture in April. He called iPlayer a "big step, a pre-emptive intervention in a marketplace otherwise hugely competitive and moving very fast", which roughly translates as “oh sugar we didn’t expect that to be so popular”.

Earlier on I listed Microsoft as one of the potential losers from the growth of the cloud but this is only partially true, I do believe that there is a threat to the ubiquitous bundling of MS Office on consumer PCs, however Microsoft have a number of strategies to underpin their position on the business users desk top. Their trump card in business is the need for larger organisations to maintain control of their own data and business processes. In the last few years Microsoft have made massive strides into the so called enterprise systems market, competing directly with the likes of Oracle, IBM and SAP, to provide the core systems, which drive the operation of large business and public sector organisations and even the internet itself.

Microsoft executives like to tell you that their fastest ever product to reach 1 billion dollars in revenue is SharePoint, which (in case you were wondering) is essentially a new, network centric approach to managing corporate documents, and data to allow greater collaboration and teamwork. SharePoint essentially ties together MS office, Outlook and the Windows file system to provide a more integrated and centralised approach to managing information within a business.

This sounds like a great idea to most IT managers, hence the rapid take-up; it also happens to pretty much tie you in to using the rest of the Microsoft product set which sounds like a great idea to Microsoft.

Google meanwhile have become more or less synonymous with the web, latest figures suggest that nearly 70% of web searches in the US use Google and in the UK this figure is a staggering 87%. From this position of strength Google have launched a number of other high profile applications which directly compete with Microsoft but do so based on delivery from the cloud. The best example of this is Google Docs which is a suite of office like applications for documents, spreadsheets and presentations which are accessed directly from the web browser with all of the data being stored on Google’s own servers somewhere in the cloud.

Google have made their competitive aims even more clear this month with the launch of their own web browser, Chrome. This competes directly with Internet Explorer and claims to set new standards for speed and stability and for its support of modern, feature rich applications such as, you guessed it, Google Docs. In tune with their fresh and youthful image Google have even accompanied the launch of chrome with a 39 page comic book which explains the thinking behind the new browser to teenage geeks everywhere. But be warned there are no jokes or super heroes (at least not in the first 9 pages). The best thing of all though is that it was put together by someone who goes by the name of Scott McCloud!