The music industry may find that convincing consumers to pay for legally downloaded DRM protected music is about to get a whole lot harder this autumn, as Microsoft has decided to use its immense tech industry muscle to make an utter mockery of the whole business.

In the wake of iTunes making a huge amount of money from selling DRM protected music, Microsoft desperately wanted to get in on the act, and so set up its own competitor - MSN Music. However, somewhat predictably thanks to the ubiquity of the iPod, the draconian restrictions of Microsoft’s PlaysForSure format, and the complexity of the whole system, Microsoft failed to make much of an impact, and so is now closing down it’s MSN Music store.

However, in a move that looks purely incendiary and vindictive, it’s also taking the servers used to validate the DRM licences offline (as reported - with relish - by Googler Mark Pilgrim).

Essentially, if you’ve ‘bought’ music from the MSN Music store, in a few weeks’ time you’ll find that any major change to your PC setup - be that changing devices, buying a new portable music device, or even upgrading Windows - will render your music unplayable.

So, having taken your money, Microsoft seem to no longer care whether the product works any more.

This leaves us with a huge number of unanswered questions, the most pressing of which would seem to be: Will they begin taking the same approach to old versions of software, and stop running software validation servers? Whilst MSN Music and Microsoft Software may be different beasts, it doesn’t seem unfeasable to suggest that this approach to licensing isn’t the corporate philosophy.

Most tech-savvy individuals have been aware for a long time that something like this could theoretically happen, but I’d be willing to bet that many thought that Microsoft was trustworthy enough to continue to allow you to access products you’ve paid for. This no longer seems to be the case.

It’s the strongest argument yet against DRM, and - for that matter - against buying any Microsoft product. If you’re running Microsoft Software, who knows if the next install will work or if the Validation Servers will have been taken offline?

» Image Credit: MSN Music screenshot by Luke ‘Duke’ Newcombe, modified under licence

I am not a horse, and hence have no desire to eat from a bucket. If someone told KFC, maybe they’d stop irritating me with their awful ads. «

Yesterday, somewhat rashly, I promised more coverage of the fact that I’ve now been blogging continuously for five years.

On reflection, I’m not sure there’s so much more to say: Five years, 1324 posts in the (newly redesigned) archive, a full spin-off site of academic stuff, and a book. Oh, and around 2000 comments - from considered to the hilarious, from the misguided to the insulting, and from the inspiring to the bizarre - from you, dear readers. Thank you for all of them.

Looking back at the last five years, much about the site has changed: I just wouldn’t write this today, but then neither would I write this - I hope that the site has progressed over the last few years, but I know there are some who would prefer the latter kind of content to that which I produce today. I guess that progress is relative and dependent on point of view. All I know for sure is that sjhoward.co.uk now reaches far more eyeballs than it ever has before, and has registered more than 3.2 million hits for 2008 so far.

Thank you to those who have stuck with me over the last five years, and thank you too to the relative newcomers who enjoy the site. There will be much more to come from sjhoward.co.uk over the next five years, so I hope you’ll all stick around.

» Image Credit: Original photograph by Daniel Catt, modified under licence.

As of today, I’ve been blogging continuously for five years… and my fingers aren’t worn down to the bone yet! More about this tomorrow. «

Gordon Brown’s disastrous round of interviews on Sunday morning merely added fuel to a fire which had already reached an unprecedented temperature at the heart of government. Each and every interview was a complete and utter shambles. Gordon should not have done them. They were a mistake, and they highlight the underlying problem of Brown’s occupation of Number 10 - bad advice.

Either Gordon or his team have failed to realise that Mr Brown is a completely different creature to his predecessor. They need to understand that to succeed as Prime Minister, Mr Brown urgently needs to stop attempting to use Blairite media tactics to tackle Brownite problems.

Gordon is, without doubt, a poor communicator - the public speaking antithesis of Tony. He does not come across with clear, crisp soundbites. He does not portray empathy. He emanates boredom, surliness, and arrogance. A round of mea culpa interviews in the face of electoral defeat was not the right call.

Agreeing to appear on every political programme going made him look desperate. He should have agreed to a single, exclusive interview, probably with Andrew Marr (his is the show which gets both the most viewers and the most dissemination through other media outlets, and that which has the host most sympathetic to Mr Brown).

He should have done the interview on his turf - get Marr to come to Downing Street, and conduct the interview surrounded by the trappings of power, helping to reaffirm Mr Brown’s position as the Prime Minister: He may have had an electoral battering, but he’s still in charge, still working hard for the people, and - ultimately - still in Downing Street. The pilgrimage to the BBC studios made him look unnecessarily weak, and levelled him with his opponents.

No programme in its right mind would have denied this relatively straight-forward rider when trying to negotiate potentially the most politically significant TV interview of the year. Everyone wanted him, and the programmes could - if necessary - have been played off each other. The neutral surroundings would also have helped to get other broadcasters to play the exclusive interview, as it wouldn’t be so clearly exclusive. Or, alternatively, the interview could have been pooled as a further rider.

Yet the surroundings would have only improved a bad situation - Mr Brown’s alienating nature is a bigger problem. He needs to be coached in how to talk to the electorate. I’m sure this is something his team is working to tackle, but drastic solutions are urgently needed.

Firstly, he needs to be banned from using the phrase ‘global economy’. He’s forever talking about it, and it is utterly meaningless to the vast majority of people. I hear nobody in the real world complaining about the state of the world economy - I see teachers striking over pay, people complaining about the rising cost of food, and increasing concern about petrol prices. To communicate effectively with the country at large, Mr Brown needs to frame discussion in these terms - something David Cameron does excellently, and to great effect.

Secondly, he needs to stop talking about himself. That’s a Blairite tactic, which worked brilliantly for Tony as he had the personality to carry it off. Brown doesn’t possess the necessary connection with voters to manage this - he needs to be the professional, distant leader. He needs to let go of the details, lead with big ideas, and communicate these in a commanding way. He’s a leader who needs not sell the ideas to the people, but rather allow the people to see the benefits of the results. Fewer attempts at personality, more attempts at policy. More of the Stalin, less of the Bean.

And that brings us to the other great failure of this interview: The distinct lack of policy. In his single exclusive interview, Mr Brown should have been armed with an arresting announcement - something along the lines of freezing fuel duty increases to help the poor, or even a major reshuffle of the cabinet since ‘the voters have told us things aren’t working’. Pretty much anything would have moved the news cycle forward, and taken the focus away from Mr Brown and the disastrous election.

This approach would have left him open to accusations of being reactionary, which is why I’d favour the former approach rather than the latter. A reactionary reshuffle would probably play well for the Conservatives in terms of painting the Government as ‘panicked’, but a freezing - or cutting - of fuel duty would be such a populist measure that it would be difficult for the Conservatives to land a meaningful punch. With oil prices rising, revenue from fuel duty is rising unexpectedly quickly anyway, so it wouldn’t leave much of a Budgetry hole.

All of these factors represent basic tactical errors, whether on the part of Mr Brown himself or his surrounding advisory team. Either way, this whole electoral defeat - and many of his other ‘crises’ alike - could have been handled much more effectively.

The fact is that Mr Brown could make for an excellent Prime Minister. He’s vastly more intelligent that his predecessor, appears to desperately hunger after ‘doing the right thing’, and he’s deeply principled. All he needs to do is to learn to keep his hands off the details, make snappier decisions (accepting when he gets them wrong), and learn how to better his personal presentation.

In short, he needs better advice.

» Image Credit: Original photograph from the World Economic Forum, modified under licence.

Over the past week or so, along with some simple design tweaks, much of sjhoward.co.uk has been restructured. The old design of the archive, for example, was appropriate for when the blog had 250 posts, but not for the 1,300+ posts of today. The new structure shouldn’t feel like too much of a change (I’m hoping most visitors won’t have noticed), and should be a more future-proof solution. Here’s hoping.

Labour have been hammered across the country in local elections and have lost the Mayoralty of London. Coverage of this result has reached saturation point, and I’m not sure that there’s much I can add.

Last year, with respect to Mr Brown, I predicted

If he continues to crash his way through crisis after crisis, announcing ridiculous policy after ridiculous policy, then the next government of this country will be Conservative.

He’s doing the media rounds tomorrow. In the face of multiple political crises, a failing economy, and an historic election defeat - really, what can he say that will change anything? I expect he has a half-baked plan to announce something impressive to move along the news agenda.

Like much that Mr Brown does, I fully expect it will fail.

Gordon Brown has a fascinating plan for the NHS: Increase patient choice, whilst simultaneously driving the cost of healthcare down to deliver better ‘value for money’. The plan is fascinating primarily because its two aims are utterly contradictory.

As any good economist - Gordon Brown included - will tell you, the greatest economies are those of scale. If the more specialist services from seven Anytown General Hospitals can be lumped together at the Bigcity Regional Specialist Unit, and the five GP practices in each Anytown are combined with the remaining General Hospital Services in a Polyclinic, then costs can be massively reduced. Less real estate, fewer administrative staff, and fewer healthcare staff are needed to serve the same number of patients. Economically speaking, it’s a nobrainer.

Yet while the out-of-town model is great for businesses and retailers, it’s crap for healthcare - and also flies in the face of current policy. Which is where Mrs Goggins comes in.

Gordon currently wants to offer old Mrs Goggins a choice of places to have her cataracts seen to - most likely, she’ll choose Anytown General, as it’s closest to her house and more convenient all round. She’s unlikely to be attracted by the lure of Bigcity Regional Specialist Unit, 50 miles away, and she’d rather wait an extra couple of months to have her eyes operated on closer to home. And that’s pretty much all well and good.

In a few years’ time, however, Mrs Goggins won’t have that choice. She won’t be able to go and see her local GP any more, she’ll have to travel all the way to the Health Village on the old Anytown General site, where she’ll be assessed by an economically friendly Nurse Practitioner, who will then refer her over to Virgin Healthcare’s Bigcity Regional Specialist Unit, where she can go and be assessed by another Specialist Nurse Practitioner who can consider whether or not she need make the 50 mile round trip again another day to actually see the consultant, and then a third trip to have the operation done…

When she gets to the Virgin Healthcare Bigcity Regional Specialist Unit, she’ll find she’s on a very noisy, open eight-bedded bay… but this is Virgin, so fear not, she can pay £15 per night to upgrade herself to her own private side-room with her very own TV. She won’t be able to afford to heat her house for the next few weeks, but it’ll be worth it to make her comfortable in hospital.

Her follow-up is, of course, based at the Hospital - disparate community follow-up services are desperately financially wasteful - so she can treat herself to a few more 100-mile round trips before even contemplating having the second eye done.

Of course, Mrs Goggins will still have some choice - she needn’t go to Bigcity if she doesn’t want to - she can go to any of the Specialist Units in the country, she’s not restricted to the nearest.

Or else, she could decide that the whole thing is far too hard, and she’ll just put up with her cataracts - And, after all, that’s the best choice for us, economically speaking.

» Image Credit: Original photograph by Christopher Walker, modified under licence.

The Big British Castle has changed the I’d Do Anything video format… So the weekly posts have become impractically time-consuming. Sorry! «

It was with deep regret that I learned on Friday evening of the death of one of radio’s greatest dry wits, Humphrey Lyttelton.

I’ll always remember him as the wonderful host of one of Radio 4’s best shows, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, though Radio 2’s The Best of Jazz was the soundtrack to and from the journey to many of my own music lessons in my youth.

His is one of those friendly voices which has been ever-present from my earliest years to the present day: It a voice I shall greatly miss.

May he rest in peace.