Small- and mid-sized businesses who didn’t take up the earlier offer to get a free Microsoft Windows 10 upgrade are how being given another opportunity to do so.

Ended Last Summer

Microsoft’s previous offer of a Windows 10 upgrade, which was part of its push to get the new O/S out there and to move customers onto a new ‘as-a-service’ subscription based model, ended last August (i.e. 2016). The final months of the offer last time around however were not without controversy. For example, at the time, users complained about strong-arm forced upgrade tactics, Microsoft’s tracking practices, a lack of clarity about the upgrade and the upgrade process, a reliance on Microsoft’s store, and unhappiness about feeling forced into accepting upgrades from what could be perceived as a monopoly on the OS market.

The New Free Upgrade Opportunity

The new free upgrade extension applies to personal computers running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 and is limited to businesses (SMBs) that have signed up for Windows 10 Enterprise E3, E5, and Secure Productive E3 and E5 Enterprise subscription plans.

Windows 10 Enterprise E3 or E5 subscriptions delivered through a CSP program by Microsoft resellers require customers to already be running Windows 10 Pro.

However, some customers may have already acquired Windows 10 / Windows 10 Pro outside of the offer by simply purchasing new equipment with it already installed.

Why The New Extension?

The new deal is, therefore, a second sweep intended to convert those remaining Windows 7 and 8.1 machines that were not replaced with newer hardware, or where a business (for whatever reason) did not decide to take up last year’s free upgrade. It is part of the broad strategy to maximise Microsoft’s revenue by moving all customers to the software-as-a-service model, to promote the partner-centric CSP, and perhaps to move customers to more expensive options such as Windows 10 Enterprise.

The License Giveaway

Whereas business customers who missed out on the previous upgrade opportunity would have needed to buy a 10 Pro license (because the offer was Windows 10 Pro based), this new upgrade opportunity is essentially giving them the license for free, which is something that would normally cost $199.

The license given as part of this new offer will, however, be perpetual, and device specific which means that it will continue even if customers end their Windows cloud subscription in the CSP.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Microsoft is clearly committed to the ‘as-a-service’ model with its current Windows 10 and future operating system versions. Moving forward with Microsoft therefore means that getting Windows 10 is inevitable, so this re-introduction of an old offer could be viewed as a chance to get something for free that you may probably have been intending to get anyway at some point in the near future.

It is of course still likely that some problems will occur when the automatic updates happen, as has already been the case on several occasions, but if you haven’t already upgraded, now may be a good time to consider the many benefits that Windows 10 offers.

You may also wish to get more advice about how Windows 10 could work for you.

The UK government’s post-Brexit strategy green paper ‘Building our Industrial Strategy’ shows that its previous commitments to more funding for rural broadband and rolling-out and 5G mobile networks is still on the cards.

Commitments Last Year

Back in his 2016 Autumn Statement, UK Chancellor Philip Hammond said that the government would invest £400m in a digital infrastructure fund in order to boost commercial financing for new small fibre broadband providers / altnets. The Chancellor also committed to investing £750m in local full fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) broadband roll-out in order to help ibusinesses and the public sector, and to help integrated 5G mobile and fibre projects.

The hope at the time was to help boost the economy more evenly across the UK, even in rural areas, rather than just concentrating on areas such as London and the South East.

What Does The New Green Paper Tell Us?

Apart from a re-confirmation of the £400m digital infrastructure fund investment and offering £10m less for the FTTP rollout, the new green paper outlined the expectations of the government in terms of what the investment could deliver in output and growth.

For example, the green paper highlighted research figures which show that better-connected businesses and customers and increased broadband speeds could add an estimated £17bn per annum to UK output. It also suggested that an increase in broadband penetration of just 10% could be responsible for a potential 0.25% increase in GDP growth.

What Doesn’t The Green Paper Tell Us?

Some critics of the new green paper have pointed out that it doesn’t actually tell us any more about what progress has been made with the improvements in the UK’s digital infrastructure since the November 2016 announcements. It also gives little indication of the timetable for the plan.

Met With Approval By Industry Insiders

It is perhaps not surprising that whatever the green paper may have lacked, its release and the surrounding publicity have been met with noises of approval by telecoms companies such as Telefónica UK.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Although there is still no clear timescale, the post-Brexit government intention to carry on as planned with the UK communications upgrade has to be good news for businesses, particularly those in rural areas and those outside London and the South East who have felt at a disadvantage.

Comments in the media from businesses have so far included positive responses to the news that businesses nationwide could soon be able to benefit from 5G technology and the local growth that it could bring. There has also been recognition that there are challenges to overcome, such as (government) being able to facilitate an increase in the number of antenna sites for 5G, and the need for the right regulatory environment for coverage and data demands i.e. one that encourages investment and competition.

Information Services Group (ISG) figures show that in 2016, traditional outsourcing contracts were replaced by cloud-based services to the point where spending on cloud based contracts increased by 33% compared to 2015.
Fall and Rise

The ISG figures show that at the same time, cloud-based spending rose by such a huge amount, spending on traditional outsourcing dipped to its lowest level since 2009. In the UK, traditional outsourcing spending fell 10% with the number of contract awards declining by a third.

Global Trend

Across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) the replacing of traditional outsourcing contracts with cloud-based ones is fast becoming a clear trend. ISG figures in this geographical area show traditional outsourcing contract value falling by almost a third in 2016, while at the same time, ‘as-a-service’ contact value reaching a record high of €900m.

Globally the picture is the same. Outsourcing spend in 2016 increased by 9% to €30bn, and as-a-service contracts increased by a massive 38% over 2015 figures.

Traditional Vs Now

Traditional outsourcing contracts could be described as those where a supplier of IT Support Services uses its own people and in-house resources to handle that service e.g. developing and supporting software for the customer.

New kinds of contracts however offer different models such as software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), all of which essentially provide flexibility / scalability, easier management and upgrades, and lower costs.

Evidence

As well as the ISG figures for example, technical commentators have pointed to evidence in the marketplace based on the actions taken by big companies in favour of the cloud.

Examples include the phenomenal growth of SaaS suppliers such as NetSuite and its acquisition by Oracle for $9.3 billion, as well as Centrica’s move away from Fujitsu data centres to Microsoft 365.

Why?

Technical commentators broadly appear to agree that the nature of outsourcing contracts is changing as cloud providers expand their data centre footprints, company spending moves towards business-led digital initiatives, and businesses continue to see the wide scale, successful adoption and use of the cloud by competitors.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

If it is not already happening, and if your business is outsourcing its IT Support, more elements of your contract are likely to be cloud-based in the near future. Your competitors are likely to be taking advantage of the flexibility and cost savings that the cloud offers, and its use looks like becoming an important source of competitive advantage that you may wish to give to your business. You may wish to consider compliance issues such as where your data is located.

Akamai figures show that the inauguration of President Donald Trump broke all live video streaming records in terms of the rate of data transmission in Terabytes per second (tbps).

Largest Single Live News Event.

The figures from Akami show that prior to President Trump’s inauguration, the largest live streaming event was U.S. Election Day (evening) back on 8th November 2016 when 7.5 Tbps was achieved. President Trump’s inauguration ‘trumped’ that figure with a high of 8.7 Tbps during the opening of his speech.

Context?

To put these figures in some kind of context, other figures from U.S. content delivery network (CDN) and cloud services provider Akami show that the UK 2011 Royal Wedding only managed 1.3 Tbps. It is accepted however that real comparisons over longer periods of time are difficult due to rapid advances in HD video streaming, which now requires higher bitrates and has more viewers.

Better comparisons could therefore be more recent ones such as the 7.3 Tbps and 3.3 million concurrent viewers for the 2016 Euro soccer tournament final which is clearly much closer to the figures achieved during the inauguration.

Mitigating Factors.

In attempting to explain how President Trump’s inauguration broke all previous live streaming records some commentators have also cited possible mitigating factors such as the fact that:

• It was a mid-day event so many people may have been able to watch from computers at work, or they were live streaming the news via mobile devices.
• There are now more mobile devices in use, and increased broadband speeds and more mobile broadband developments since many of the pre-2010 big-hitting live video streaming event records were set.
• Numbers of video sites and services where people can watch big events are now at their most prevalent.
• There has been a trend for some time now which sees people shifting away from traditional TV viewing to spend more of their time online.
• This was an internationally newsworthy event given what some would consider to be some unprecedented circumstances and publicity leading up to it.

What Does This Mean For Your Businesses?

For businesses seeking to host events, one important publicity and participation avenue to seriously consider may be now be live video streaming. Figures show that more people than ever are now watching video online, it’s being done across more devices, and at increasingly higher levels of quality, and this could represent an important channel for business communications, particularly as more services become available and costs fall.

A family in Texas is suing Apple because they believe that a driver who was allegedly distracted by a FaceTime call on his iPhone while at the wheel was the reason for a road accident which resulted in the death of their five-year-old daughter.

What Happened?

Media reports about the accident show that the Modisette family, with their young daughter Moriah, were travelling along a busy Texas interstate highway on Christmas Eve, 2014 when a car accident ahead of them caused the traffic to stop and queue. Unfortunately, while the Modisette family stopped, the driver behind them, named as 22-year-old Garrett Wilhelm, is reported to have driven into their car at 65mph. The accident resulted in the death of the Modisette family’s young daughter and it also meant the charging of Garrett Wilhelm with manslaughter.

FaceTime Call

The evidence which is now at the centre of the Modisette family’s decision to seek redress against Apple for what they believe its alleged role in the crash is the fact that Texas highway patrol have claimed that officers at the scene found Wilhelm’s 6S Plus Apple iPhone still on the FaceTime call in the wreckage of his car.

Why Blame Apple?

Reports appear to point to a conclusion that Wilhelm may have allegedly been on a FaceTime call using his Apple iPhone at the time of the crash. It is also understood that an Apple patent for technology that might have saved young Moriah Modisette’s life appears to be at the heart of lawsuit by the Modisette family against Apple, for gross negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Phone Locking System

It appears that Apple was granted permission in 2014 for a patent outlining a system that could reportedly be added to iPhones. The system could lock a smartphone when sensors detect that it is being used in a moving vehicle.

At the time of the crash, even though the patent permission had been granted, Apple had not added the system to the model of iPhone that Wilhelm was using. It appears therefore that the Modisette family’s claim for damages and the payment of their medical and legal fees is based upon their belief that Apple was allegedly negligent by not introducing the potentially life-saving system to that iPhone model and therefore they allegedly played a part in the death of young Moriah.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Following on from the UK police clampdown back in November of hand-held mobile use while driving, this is, of course, another reminder for us all of the dangers of distraction at the wheel by technology and of the need to use hands-free options (responsibly).

Third-party apps designed to stop mobile use while driving already exist, and this case, combined with evidence gathered on UK roads could show that there is a need and an opportunity for apps / technology development based around driving safety.