Eagle-eyed surfers will already have spotted my bumbling efforts as part of the Cloud Power initiative, and those who didn’t can now go and have a bit of a giggle, come back, and say whatever comes to their mind in reaction to the footage.
I thought I’d do a bit of a behind-the-scenes account here for interested parties, and also explain why I’m happy to take the risk of being an idiot in a video that exists purely because a single vendor – Microsoft – wanted to make it.
First off: Tim and I didn’t rehearse. I believe I get worse with each rehearsal, starting from a pretty low base in the first place. We had a set of basic questions but we didn’t have any set conclusions we were expected to work towards. Given the breadth of the questions being asked, this was something of a relief.
The Microsoft guys didn’t rehearse for this event specifically either, but on the other hand they are presenting on these topics almost all of the time. If there was going to be a difference of opinion across the panel it would be because we were coming in from different perspectives – well, to my mind, that’s the point of making the video in the first place.
Probably the strongest criticism I know will come in from the “balanced comment” faction. That’s the kind of guys who want the most glancing aside to encompass the entire of human civilisation, and woe betide any commentator who leaves out a name-check for this or that. Yes, we made a video with Microsoft. No, we didn’t set out to encompass the whole planet, much less the whole of computing, or the whole of cloud, or even the whole of the topics that our questions raised.
When Jon Honeyball and I were caught on the hop by tough questions during a client meeting, we managed to dive into the subjects raised for almost four hours
I don’t think it detracts from the video to say that when Jon Honeyball and I were caught on the hop by tough questions during a client meeting, we managed to dive into the subjects raised for almost four hours: very beneficial to that client (we think!) but not a practical proposition when making a web video.
Also, making every possible outing as perfectly balanced between market players as possible is, I would propose, a bit of an insult to the intelligence of the audience. We expect you guys to be able to remember things we’ve said, from one piece to the next. We positively invite you to think through the issues raised – in print or as video – and come back with “so that means” questions.
Secondly, everyone benefits when players say what they want to say. Tripping them up or sniggering at them about Vista doesn’t help to understand what they are doing (or in this case, thinking) about a particular topic. That doesn’t mean I won’t be doing a bit of sniggering in the future – it seems that a large part of Microsoft’s appetite to enter into this kind of co-operative venture is driven by our reputation for taking no nonsense from anyone – but I would say that the topic here produces a bit of suspension of the usual rules of combat.
Cloud (as the video shows) makes me wave my arms about a lot and try to find reasonable metaphors for how people need to approach a thoroughly abstract subject: I think that Tim, me, Simon and Planky were joined in a common task of interpretation, which to the credit of the Microsoft guys stayed pretty abstract, except when I decided to clear up a few things I’d heard about Office 365.
I don’t mind sharing the thought that I was scared of being asked to think away from the keyboard; and I’m reasonably convinced that my topics gain a bit of fresh perspective from being handled this way. It’s not just “aren’t we clever, we can do video” – I think this is a useful thing to do.
