Jun

12

Cloud Lucky Seven

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

We have been doing Desert Island Discs in my family. For non-UK readers, this refers to a radio programme which for some 50 years has asked a guest each week to nominate 8 discs they would like to be washed up on a desert island with – and why. My sister, yanking us all back to our first wind-up gramophone of circa 1952, nominated Guy Mitchell singing “Cloud Lucky Seven”. You can find it on YouTube: a powerful demonstration of why it was necessary to invent Elvis Presley. But also a reminder, as I baked in 98 Fahrenheit New York this week under pitiless, cloudless skies, that it is often the case, once something has been invented, that it is necessary to discover it. And as Presley discovered in the ambient music of his culture what had been there in black and rhythm and blues for generations, so Steve Jobs announced the rediscovery of something very familiar to all of us, and rebranded it iCloud. It is very clever, this rediscovery, and often hugely successful.

Which is a natural segue to Steve Jobs and iCloud, a rediscovery so dramatic that a whole generation will grow up thinking that this great marketeer invented remote storage, despite the fact that everyday life, from Googlemail to Salesforce.com, would be unthinkable without remote storage, and that our future as information processors has nothing to do with local storage. But the real significance of the iCloud announcement is that it marks the end of the beginning of the end for personal computing. In 1981, the IBM PC enabled people like me to get into ePublishing by the fact of putting a real computer on every desk. In 2008 the PCs on desktops across the globe passed 1 Billion, but they will never sell another billion. We all know that after years of talking about the “thin client” environment, the time has now come to hold our programming and storage remotely, and carry around the lightest and slightest of interfacing technologies. Three years ago that was the notebook: since early 2010 it has been the tablet. The earth has truly moved.

But at the heart of all of this there is a contradiction. Despite all the things that came with the PC to make things easier for us (the mouse, the GUI – graphical user interface – the desktop, the floppy disc and the CD-ROM) we were aware that we were doing “proper” computing. Those like me who bought the BBC Micro and failed to teach themselves Basic programming in the early 1980s at least recognized that they were working, at a fixed place and in an office, in a very traditional way. In order to overcome the bandwidth problems of dial-up networking, we rapidly accelerated local storage – a brilliant man called Bela Hatvany walked into my office at Thomson’s Eurolex in 1984, showed me a silver disc, and proceeded to load the European Court of Justice judgements on it. So now we could carry storage around, or send it out to customers from the warehouse, packed like the book products we were familiar with, and pretend that the world had not moved at all. But it had at least begun, and this exposes the contradiction: if the tablet is to be our access to the Cloud, when can we expect the tablet to have all of the functionality we associate with desktop computing, as well as all of the on-the-move features we want to associate with work no longer fixed to workplaces. This has not happened – the executive in the conference room making notes on his iPad invariably has a laptop in his hotel bedroom – and it will never quite happen. Instead better functionality in the Cloud will plug us into commonplace desktop features, while the tablet itself concentrates on linking us with less effort to workplace solutions held in the Cloud. In this way we will attain a bi-focal view of the world: able in one aspect of the screen to use devices to communicate and run functions in networks, while replacing browsing by solutioning – using Apps to resolve content access into answers which can be framed and understood in the tablet context. And it is not Steve Jobs who is entirely driving this: it is the overloaded, overheated world of content itself that dictates that we cannot any longer, to use the popular metaphor, drink from the fire hose. And the corollary of all of this is that native Internet backbone becomes ever more important, at the expense of web services sitting on top of it. How soon before we click on a Cloud Services dashboard?

And as Mr Jobs claimed the Cloud, two other announcements last week suggested the future battlegrounds in those content sectors. In the first, FT.com announced its own app (and, surely co-incidentally, Apple announced a lightening of regulations for publishers, though not the full deal in terms of allowing content vendors to get fundamental information on users). The FT position is admirable. It supports an Apple App available through iTunes. At the same time it supports an app downloadable from the FT website which can be used in any tablet context, including the iPad. While a colleague commented that “a US provincial paper would never have got away with this”, the announcement does show that the attempt by Apple to control and discipline the content marketplace may be beginning to waver. And it also demonstrates, of course, that the FT “gets it” in this generation in a way that it did not in the past, and that it is one of few players who really do. We are on our way to the re-invention of the newspaper as a service: this is a non-stopping express, though since the windows are open (pun intended) some passengers may fall out on the curves.

As this column has said many times, surviving is about being big and getting bigger. So some were non-plussed at the Thomson Reuters announcement that their healthcare interests were to be sold by the end of the year (though they retain Web of Science and its related activities in their IP section). Yet this seems the inexorable consequence of their business logic. While healthcare is still a market full of buzz, with a huge information investment profile, Thomson Reuters were a trailing third in a market where solutions of the type described here as workflow are becoming vital. Without huge investment, or buying WK Health, great content like MicroMedex could not be fully optimized, though Thomson Healthcare have been making some good progress with care provider contracting. As a result of the divestment (and note the wonderful history of Thomson divestments as a guide to industry sentiment), a significant industry consolidation could take place, an existing player or a software vendor could reposition, or a new player with the investment needed could enter the US market.  In current economic circumstances a private equity exit seems less likely than a strategic buyer with a healthy balance sheet. My bet in the past in these pages has been Springer, for which I have been soundly beaten around the head by all parties. We shall see.

May

27

Education in Everything

Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

We who dare to call ourselves “analysts” of information marketplaces must bear a heavy burden of guilt. As we analyse we are forced to categorize, and as we categorize we over-simplify, and as we over-simplify we construct truly skewed pictures of market activity, sometimes seized upon by sectoral groups to make sectional points. One frustrating exemplar of this for me was always academic spending, as industry strategists sought on the one hand to get a grip on what content access universities bought, while many publishers sought to narrow the focus to books and journals, thus omitting entirely the huge sums spent on data and flattering their market share in a smaller “marketplace”. Similar contortions exist around education and training. I observe that almost every publisher I know is definably “educational” (a context, not a category), and, of course, every vertical marketplace  devotes considerable amounts to education in formal and informal contexts. This implies a huge marketplace which is really hard to categorize, so we define it by identifying a sub-group of players whose interests are wholly or mostly educational, and let them stand as a proxy. This may serve for some trend analysis purposes, but it is essentially arbitrary. I was very amused yesterday when one of our finest UK educational publishers said to me that she could discern market share moves “from the EPC figures”. The EPC (Educational Publishers Council), an offshoot of the UK’s Publishers Association, collects data from its members, and thus records the sales of school books and software from sources that define themselves as publishers. Thus it forms a small proportion of school spending on educational content, and one whose trend line may or may not reflect buying patterns in schools. Turn to training and the problem is magnified  many times: trainers and corporates buy what suits them whatever the source, and increasingly training and assessment environments are built into information products and services that might ostensibly be about a wholly different process or workflow.

For these reasons amongst others I read Joe Esposito’s two pieces on “Creating a New University Press” on Scholarly Kitchen (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/author/jesposito/) this week with great relish. Much of what he says applies to starting any form of new “press” (glorious anachronism there!). He clearly feels that what he describes as a “library publishing” model is viable, and I can see that this would make sense of things like institutional repositories, which are surely currently collections without purpose for the most part. But I am wholly on his side when he says that the New University Press “sits outside of any particular institutions, is borne-digital, avoids areas where established publishers have staked out territory, experiments with publishing forms and distribution channels and is NFP (not for profit).” And his examples – PLoS, JSTOR, the Humanities eBook programme at ACLS, and OCLC – while having market impact on spending, are very hard to categorize and may or may not be in anyone’s categorization scheme. Yet they can certainly be categorized amongst the “university presses of the future”, and in some instances, like PLoSPlus, could have a real trend impact on market development and the future of cherished publishing shibboleths like peer review.

And then again, Joe’s piece caught my attention in another sense I have been reading an excellent review article on Linked Data co-authored by Tom Heath of Talis. When Joe pinged Morgan and Claypool (http://www.morganclaypool.com/) as an example of what he was talking about, I found that they were the publishers of this piece. I also found that what I had was part of a really interesting borne digital publishing programme, creating sector reviews in a wide range of academic disciplines as Synergies and Colloquium, and bundling them for license to faculties or individual students. This does not need to be peer-reviewed – the publisher process and the reputation of the contributors does that – so the expense is mostly in formatting and editing – and overwhelmingly in marketing. So, having smugly discovered something new to me, courtesy of Joe, I commenced this blog, and my first research established that this company was founded in 2002, so from the aftermath of Dot Com Bust  they are coming up to 10 years old. That’s a millennium in Gutenburg terms, and I have no doubt that they are still not inside anyone’s statistical net. We may be approaching the time when the new markets that we do not measure are as large as the old ones that we do.

Which is not to say for a moment that old publishers are not innovative. A favourite of mine over the years has been Nature (Macmillan) an offspring of the Victorian love affair with Science. Their event this week was the launch (http://www.nature.com/nature_education/biology.html) of a $45 Principles of Biology digital “textbook”. Real innovation here: this is a rental access model, they will update and the pricing is entirely different from the existing print market. And this venture has a strategic partner in California State University. Partner and anchor client (but at least one Californian university group still loves Nature!) Downside (in my view): we still have to call this wonderful product built for an iPad world a “Textbook” when it is really a learning experience – and one which also allows teacher monitoring. Cal State will block purchase and include the cost in tuition fees – and will that get into the market statistics at any point?

So, said my fine educational publisher friend, digital still doesn’t seem to be having much impact on educational marketplaces. To which I must respond, “It depends what you are measuring, but I am certain sure that wherever you look there is unmeasured digital education – in everything.”

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