Businesses are used to renting things - from office space and furniture to cars and equipment. But what's their attitude when it comes to software?

Since the early days PC buying, it's felt like a natural step to also purchase a copy of whatever office productivity suite happened to be popular at the time. Often it came pre-loaded making the decision even easier.

But the game is changing. Increasingly businesses are being offered the chance to rent the software they need, replacing the upfront cost with a monthly fee.

The trend has been given a significant boost by Microsoft which is pushing hard to make it more popular among small and mid-sized firms. The Seattle-based software monolith is offering its popular Office suite on a subscription basis and has been touting the benefits of taking such an approach.

As well as removing the need for an upfront purchase, renting software that is then delivered by the 'cloud' brings some other benefits.

A business can scale up (and down) the number of user licenses it needs as requirements change. Try doing that with traditional packages.

Also, much of the management complexity is removed - a big deal for a small firm without in-house IT support. All updates and maintenance is handled by the software provider with users simply accessing the tools via a web browser.

The trend is not confined to office productivity suites. It is also being applied to everything from CRM and sales systems to collaboration and communications tools.

Does renting software make sense for your business?

The Australian music industry's mistrust of the NBN shows how little it's learned over the last decade.

Music sales are finally on the rise globally, for the first time since Napster shook the industry to its foundations back in 1999. What's most interesting is that it's online sales and subscription music services which came to the rescue -- once the industry started working with the internet rather than against it.

Despite the NBN's potential to open new markets, the music industry still sees it as a threat and is calling on the Government step up its war on file-sharing. The music industry is worried that high-speed internet access for all will make it far too easy for people to steal music.

The fact is that it already couldn't be easier to steal music online. It's been ridiculously easy to steal music online for many years. People were happily stealing music over dial-up, thanks to peer-to-peer distribution networks which were a lot more efficient than legit alternatives (if there even were legit alternatives). Some people are still happily stealing music today, over flaky 1 Mbps DSL connections. They'll keep stealing music over 100 Mbps fibre connections. The only thing that will change is they'll get their songs in six seconds instead of 60 seconds.

Yet something odd has happened since those dial-up days. People have gradually started paying for music online -- because they choose to, not because they have to. It's ridiculously easy to steal music. They're paying because legit services are becoming more accessible, affordable and easy to use. It's finally becoming as easy to pay for music as it is to steal it. As a result more people than ever are paying for music online. They're not going to starting stealing music when their internet access gets faster, or they'd already be stealing it. If anything they're going to buy more music and other content once they're on the NBN.

Some people are always going to steal music. But the better our internet experience gets, the more people will actually pay for music. The latest sales figures speak for themselves, but the music industry is still playing the same old broken record.

Gene Munster might not be everyone's favourite analyst, but in a recent research report (picked up by MacRumors) he looked at retail data collected by NPD and concluded January Mac sales were up 31 percent year-on-year in January.

It's no secret that iMacs were in short supply in the last calendar quarter of 2012. Some commentators are making a big deal of the way the new models were announced in October, but the 21.5in version didn't ship until the end of November with the 27in following in late December. Shipping times are still 2-3 weeks for the 21.5in and 3-4 weeks for the 27in.

But what happened last quarter has little bearing on year-on-year changes. There wasn't much going on in late 2011/early 2012 as far as Macs were concerned - July 2011 saw Mac mini and MacBook Air updates, and then nothing much happened until June 2012.

So given that new iMacs and the Retina version of the MacBook Pro were announced fairly recently, it would be a surprise if January 2013 hadn't been significantly better than January 2012. And given that notebooks contribute more to Mac sales than desktops, it seems likely that the MacBook Pro speed bump and price cuts announced earlier this month will combine with the new iMacs to make the first calendar quarter a relatively good one for Apple's Mac operation.

As I write this, Mobile World Congress is in full swing, with announcements on new platforms, chipsets, smartphones, tablets and anything else that can reasonably be called "Mobile" coming through thick and fast. Although, as has become increasingly common in recent years, a lot of companies have opted to frame their announcements around MWC rather than at MWC; some jumped the gun early last week, while others (such as Samsung) have announced when they'll announce new products during MWC, but not the products themselves. Because hype and prediction are fun, kids!

There is some nice stuff coming out of MWC if you're a portable gadget fiend, although I'm yet to see anything that's truly knocked my socks off. Nice designs, good power under the hood, but it really appears so far to be a case of mobile evolution rather than revolution. That may not matter much for regular Australian consumers in any case.

The thing is, while there's a whole lot of hype around the new devices, even the very cheap ones, there's not a whole lot of detail about Australian availability for them. Undeniably, there'll be an import market for those who are fanatical enough about a particular design or manufacturer to snap up compatible handsets once they launch in Europe or Asia, but that's a tiny fragment of the market.

It's well worth bearing this in mind when reading MWC coverage, because that shiny new handset that's being shown off in Barcelona that has you drooling all over your keyboard? It may be months before it makes its Australian debut -- if at all.

At the moment I'm reading a book, in fact the last book, by Douglas Adams, the celebrated author of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe. This book is called the Salmon of Doubt and despite being billed as the fifth edition of the franchise (I detest that term for descriptions of a series), it really isn't.

Instead, it is a series of musings, observations, predictions, ideas, and lots of silly thoughts and others not so silly that were rescued from Adams' hard drives after sadly he passed away in 2001 aged 51, from a heart attack.

(As an aside this is way too young. I have experience of this as my father died aged 53 and my older brother at the same age to the very day of the same thing. In the period before this happened I understand both refused to see doctors primarily due to pride. This meant in both cases it could have been prevented probably by taking a single pill every day that would have taken seconds. I have to say that the grief that to this day still endures not just by myself but other members of the family including my brother's children is very palpable. Ergo, seriously if you are in the age group and in the risk factors ie everyone, I urge you to at least get a doctor's check up. Hey it takes seconds and is free!)

Anyway, one of the things that Adams talks about in this book written in 1991, is his hope that voice recognition will come some time soon. It is no secret that he is an Apple Macintosh fan and he reckons it will be Apple to develop this very quickly.

I digress again and this is the real point. As many know, I own, publish and edit the magazine called Auscam (www.auscamonline.com) and when the proofs come back from the designer it can be a real pain and very time-consuming to go through and work out what the edits are to make corrections. The current edition under construction is a perfect case in point is compilation of every video camera on the market at the moment. And that includes every single technical specification.

But I have now discovered that using voice recognition, in this case DragonDictate 12, it's a breeze. I have the PDFs in one window and DragonPad (their basic notepad editor) in another, and simply scroll through the PDFs finding the errors dictate them into DragonPad and then send the document off to the layout expert. I get him to sign off each line of the edits I've made and send them back to me so I can cross-reference them.

Works a treat as much much faster than say using Adobe Acrobat markup.

Oh and blatant plug. If you have any interest in camcorders or video or the accessories that go with that we have a special at the moment on a 12 edition subscription of the real paper version of Auscam four $49.95 including postage.

See the website for details (click on “Store” in the menu bar) or email me via david@auscamonline.com.