12 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
Note this article was also published in the Nice Ventures newsletter for Q2 2004
In the late 1990s it was common to hear the hype that the broadband Internet would change things. Then there was 3G and PDA hype talking about converged (video) voice and data ... But while this hype may not have been entirely wrong certain trends mean that some parts of the hype are looking less correct than others. The Internet and broadband are indeed changing things but the form factor chosen has not quite been the one expected as it is the relatively high-end laptop which is becoming the centre of attention.
Essentially it boils down to the way we do business these days. Firstly, as a result of broadband Internet availability more and more people can realistically work from home, which means that more and more companies give more and more of their employees laptops rather than desktops. Secondly the way we work has changed with ever increasing numbers of people expected to travel yet remain in contact via email (using the various methods of Internet access) and discuss documents, make presentations etc. means that it becomes commonplace to travel with a laptop. Rather than print out a document or use an overhead projector we use the laptop to display it and rather than scrawl notes down in an organizer that we then transcribe into an electronic document we now write the document outline as the meeting progresses and just tidy it up later.
Together with the new way of working we have seen a big change in the price/performance trade off with regards to laptops. There has been a significant increase in both performance and battery life of laptops over the last couple of years. These days a high-end laptop can expect to run any office productivity application, to have a decent sized screen (at least 1024*768 - often larger), to have built in peripherals such as networking or USB, and run on battery for 4 or more hours (indeed the latest Centrino laptops seem to have a battery life of well over 6 hours under normal operation). In addition the common adoption of network standards mean that in most cases even the utterly non-technical can plug their laptop into a new network and get connectivity automatically with no need to perform complicated reconfiguration of the networking software running on the laptop. Finally today's laptop costs as much as a desktop did a few years ago so, while it is true that desktops have also dropped in price, to businesses used to spending €1000-€2000 per employee for a computer the benefits of a laptop over a desktop means that many are trading up for added convenience and flexibility rather than cutting expenditure.
All this means that a laptop can do anything we want wherever we want and whenever we want. Given that capability it is no surprise that the alternatives are less attractive. However many of them also have issues that limit their adoption even without the advantages of laptop-based life.
Many of the technologies that have enabled laptops were supposed to also enable new devices and methods of communication. Why have they not been adopted?
The concept was that we would store all our data in a central location on the Internet and then access it from anywhere using any convenient access terminal. As I see it this has died primarily because of access and security concerns. Its not that we don't use servers of one sort or another but the Internet really isn't “any time any place” so access is not 100%, furthermore ease of access often conflicts with security. We don't want our sensitive documents to be visible for all or to remain in the cache of some café terminal so that the next user can access them. Moreover when visiting clients and partners there is the problem of access to the external world: firewalls, proxies and so on mean that all but the most basic HTTP cannot necessarily be guaranteed from an enterprises corporate LAN and even that may require authentication and/or the interaction with an IT staff. Server based computing also assumes that dumb terminals (PCs) should be widely available which requires considerable speculative investment above and beyond that required to just provide Internet connectivity. Cabling and wireless access points are fairly passive activities that provide access without great expenditure whereas terminal provision is a considerably more expensive yet provides little additional benefit. In the voice world it is worth noting the swift decline in payphones in countries with high cellphone adoption rates and this seems to be for similar reasons.
PDAs suffer from form-factor and performance issues. In order to drastically increase battery life and portabilityPDAs have small screens and use a customized processors/OS. They usually either omit the keyboard or provide a very inconvenient one, often have limited communications capabilities and because of the non-standard processor/OS limited ability to run familiar PC applications. While none of these features is a drawback on its own, taken together and combined with the price – not for the entry level version so much but rather for the fully configured top of the range one – which approaches that of a “real laptop”, the convenience and power of the latter limits PDAs to a niche for extended use away from an external power supply. Indeed this niche is itself attacked by smartphones (see below) which add basic PDA functionality to a standard mobile phone to create a highly capable device. This is not to say that PDAs are not going to have their uses – and certainly not to say that they will not satisfy some users – but unlike both Smartphones and Laptops PDA sales have been flat to declining over the last year or more (see http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/3106781 amongst other pieces)
As with PDAs these products suffer from form-factor and performance issues, and in fact these issues are generally worse. Perhaps the main problem is that the phone functionality of a smartphone can rarely be disabled and indeed is often emphasized; thus these devices are primarily voice/text messaging devices that can also perform a few more general purpose office tasks. This means that rather than compete with a laptop in many cases a smartphone complements it. No one would give a powerpoint presentation from a smartphone and only serious masochists would use it to create a document or surf the web, yet on the other hand few would expect to use a laptop while using public transport or outside in a public place. Smartphones provide just enough additional functionality beyond voice to meet our needs in a mobile environment. But no one would make them the primary
The recent poor showing by Nokia seems to confirm this impression. The cellphone market is still growing and low end cellphones are still wildly popular but higher end models despite being “cool” are not as popular as the makers and the network operators would wish. There is, it would seem, a limit to how much the non-gadget freak is willing to do with a small device.
In addition to the problems faced by the alternatives, there are also a number of trends that help reinforce the utility of a general purpose portable computer. These seem likely to make drive a virtuous circle as they inspire further laptop adoption and this wider adoption in turn spurs new services and trends that make use of them.
One key application that is making the laptop more attractive is Internet telephony. There are numerous softphone clients, USB phones and so on which can make any PC into an IP phone. There are also numerous services that will permit free internet-internet telephony and will also (for a price) allow interconnection to the PSTN. Moreover, companies such as Cisco are pushing VoIP adoption within the workplace and the price of VoIP gateways, call servers and so on seems to be obeying the usual laws of electronics – that is to say decreasing as adoption rates increase. Over a private corporate data network none of the worries about packet loss or latency apply and a “road warrior” who visits a remote office of his own company with a laptop and a softphone is as easy to contact via phone as if he were at his home desk. Indeed, although many people are sceptical about the latency and packet loss of the public internet, the author has held a number of transoceanic phone calls over the public internet with success. It really is the case that so long as there is no congestion at the network edge, unlikely with broadband in most cases, packet loss / latency ceases to be an issue and with a multimedia capable laptop processing the sound of a voice call is less work than processing a DVD movie. Using your laptop as a phone has other advantages – such as the fact that it is capable of directly integrating the phone with your contacts database and manager. A more esoteric advantage is that you can answer your softphone only when the laptop is switched on and connected to the Internet or corporate intranet and that calls automatically divert to voicemail when it isn't. This, and the related benefits for outgoing calls, means that the laptop essentially defines your office with no need to remember complicated codes to redirect calls or other functions.
Scheduling, voicemail, fax; all these and many other things can easily be combined into email. In the past it was the secretary who answered the phone in one's absence, picked up faxes from the fax machine and could inform colleagues of one's whereabouts. Particularly with the various hooks into microsoft's Exchange server and IBM's Notes all these functions and more are now controlled by our email client. We can receive faxes and voicemails as email attachments, often we can send faxes via email to fax gateways, and both servers have scheduling built in along with directories, address books and so on. Once it was common to have a rolodex of business cards of contacts, these days one just scans the card into a contact manager. All of these functions run on the standard laptop and few of them run as well on the PDA or smartphone. Thus, as with phone, the secretarial parts of traditional office life are encapsulated in our laptops and its connectivity to the Internet/intranet.
The IT industry itself, not to mention the many and varied forms of management and business consultancy, have meant that the travelling salesman of old has metamorphosed into the “road warrior” of today – someone who travels frequently either visiting other parts of his own enterprise or visiting customers, sales prospects or partners. These people need a laptop to stay in contact with their colleagues via email and to make sure they can successfully perform their work. Sales calls now routinely involve Powerpoint slides and internal meetings and conference appearances likewise. The US military has disparagingly labeled its middle management “Powerpoint warriors” and the term also applies to many other fields. For a Powerpoint warrior, a laptop is de rigeur because this medium always does best with animation and that requires a live PC presentation rather than a printout or a series of overheads. Even more attractive is the way that a laptop owning Powerpoint user, can customise his presentation up to the moment he gives it, thus allowing him to include points inspired by previous contributors to a meeting.
The result of all of the above is to give a major boost to the concepts of Hot-desking and Telecommuting. Thanks to our laptops our office is no longer location dependent. Anything we can do in the office we can do anywhere else where out laptop can connect to the net. Without a laptop successfully implementing a hot-desk work environment would be nearly impossible. We store (and have to store) too much stuff locally for standard desktop computers and separate phones to really work. Perhaps more to the point humans are not identical machines, we like to personalise our workspace and we all have different ways of working and different favourite tools that we use. Sharing a phone and a desktop PC limits our ability to personalise and makes us unhappy, whereas a plain desk with a power and a network connection allows us to keep our personalised work environment on our laptops.
Telecommuters likewise do better with laptops. Although, the idea of working from home is attractive in some ways it faces a number challenges. Firstly there is the problem that humans are social beings and people who are able to function well as 100% telecommuters are rare. Most of use need the personal interaction of our colleagues some of the time and thus we probably need to be able to be in the office for a significant percentage of time perhaps 10-20%.
There is the investment in space required. For a full time telecommuter, allocating a separate room or a corner of a living room to be “the office” is OK, but for someone who only telecommutes some of the time or who spends a lot of time travelling, this investment in space is itself difficult to justify. For these sorts of telecommuters, who are probably the majority of them, a laptop that can be perched anywhere convenient is far more suitable.
The laptop in conjunction with the broadband Internet may, in the final analysis do what the computer age has promised since it started – produce the paperless office – since more and more things that produced paper in the past are now available as applications on-line or downloaded to our laptop. Certainly the laptop finally permits us to enjoy another long-promised goal – that of media convergence. The laptop really is a device that allows us (to echo the boasts of the industry) combine voice, video and data in a single device that we can use anywhere and at anytime. This article, despite eschewing visual effects, is probably a good example – not only was it produced on a laptop in two different continents and in the air above them, if you received it electronically the chances are that you are reading it using one as well – and that it reached your laptop via the Internet.