How PC Makers Can Salvage PC Sales

Tim Bajarin

If you follow the PC industry, you know that demand for PCs continues to slide. The numbers aren’t yet in for 2015, but most researchers believe that PC sales will have declined at least 5 to 7 percent.

The decline in PC demand has had serious repercussions for the overall PC industry. Over the last five years, there has been significant consolidation. Just in December, Toshiba put its PC business up for sale, meaning another stalwart of the PC industry is getting out of a very tough market. It appears that the only companies with staying power in the PC market will be Lenovo, HP, and Dell mixed, with a lot of white-box PC makers that will go after localized businesses.

Many PC vendors are very concerned about the health of the business and are looking at ways to create stronger demand for PCs going forward. They admit that even the introduction of Windows 10 has not helped grow the market. Although they see enterprise accounts showing more interest in Windows 10 in 2016, the lack of growth in the consumer market suggests that PC sales will still decline about 2 to 3 percent in 2016.

Meanwhile, average prices for consumer PCs range from as low as $129 for a Windows PC with an Atom processor to about $399- $499, with very slim margins. The only good news is that the premium market, especially for laptops, has been strong in the enterprise and with high-end consumers, and that has helped those sectors mostly stay in the black when it comes to overall PC sales.

But all the vendors I talk to say that unless they can find a way to make the PC more vital to the computing experience, demand for PCs will continue to slide. No PC vendor is content to stand still and see this decline continue, however. They are all trying to enhance the overall user experience by introducing 3D cameras, speech navigation, better optical experiences, and facial recognition for secure access. They are also working hard to add virtual reality and augmented reality functionality to the PC, and are trying to make the PC itself much more indispensable to their customers.

Current PCs are functional and do what they need to, and hardware designs have made some major strides. But even factoring in Windows 10, with its advanced UI and features like Cortana and Continuum, a PC is still basically a PC. The promise of immersive computing with VR and AR tied to a PC, however, could deliver a richer experience, like the Oculus Rift. If done correctly, it could drive up demand for PCs in the near future.

I realize this is a tall order for those in the PC ecosystem, but if the PC stays like it is now, its decline is assured. If manufacturers have any chance of growing the PC market in the future, I think it will take nothing less than delivering the kind of immersive computing experience that you just can’t get anywhere except on a PC

All Signs Point to Telecommuting

Eric Grevstad

I had a voice over IP (VoIP) conference call with HP recently. When the presentation started, an HP rep quoted some statistics. One was that 40 percent of workers’ time is now spent in meetings and on conference calls—with an average 12 minutes at the start of each call spent dialing and debugging to get everybody online.

The end of 2015 brought a fresh crop of workrelated statistics and surveys that, taken together, add up to encouraging news for home office fans. According to FlexJobs, an online service for flexible, telecommuting, and freelance work opportunities, we’re seeing nothing less than a rejection of the traditional office workspace. A full 76 percent of respondents to a recent FlexJobs survey said that, when they need to get important work done, they avoid the office.

Where do they go instead? Bingo (no, wait, I don’t mean they go to play bingo, I mean you guessed it): A home office was a far more popular choice than a coffee shop, library, or conventional office outside of normal work hours. As to why they’re more productive at home, roughly three-quarters cited fewer interruptions from colleagues and fewer distractions, and 71 percent listed freedom from office politics and 68 percent reduced stress from commuting.

With 97 percent of the people surveyed saying a more flexible job would have a positive impact on their quality of life, and four out of five saying they think it would make them healthier, it’s not surprising that 82 percent of the respondents said they’d be more loyal to their employers if they had flexible work options. A full 30 percent said they would take a pay cut of 10 to 20 percent in exchange for such options.

Are companies noticing this sentiment? They can’t afford not to. From 1995 to 2015, according to Gallup’s annual Work and Education poll, the percentage of U.S. workers who say they have telecommuted to their jobs vaulted from 9 to 37 percent.

The overall average is a modest two days per month, increasing to six days among the selfselected group of remote workers. One in four telecommuters (i.e., one in 11 employed Americans) works from home a majority of the time or more than ten days per month.

According to GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com, regular work-at-home (among telecommuters, not self-employed individuals) has grown 103 percent since 2005, and 6.5 percent in 2014. The latter is the largest year-over-year increase since before the recession. This means that 3.7 million employees (2.5 percent of the workforce) now work from home at least half of the time.

Half of U.S. jobs, Global adds, are compatible with at least partial telework, and 20 to 25 percent of the workforce telecommutes at least occasionally. Approximately 80 to 90 percent of U.S. workers say they would like to telework at least part time. Global draws a distinction between concentrative work at home and collaborative work at the office, saying the sweet spot or balance between the two seems to be about half time apiece.

Indeed, Fortune 1000 companies are remodeling their offices and their project management practices around the reality of worker mobility. HP says 62 percent of employees work from more than one location. Global says today’s office slaves are anything but chained to their desks; in fact, they’re away from their desks 50 to 60 percent of the time.

Workers, however, are still leading companies rather than the other way around. Although a study by FlexJobs and WorldatWork found that four-fifths of companies surveyed offer flexible work arrangements, only 37 percent have formal, written policies about them. And only 3 percent quantify return on investment (ROI) by measuring productivity, employee engagement, and performance ratings.

What can you do to get the boss’ blessing for telecommuting? Bring in the studies cited here and urge him or her to get with the program. Point out that this year Millennials surpassed Generation X as the largest chunk of the U.S. labor force—and Millennials overwhelmingly desire more flexible work and better work-life balance than their predecessors did.

Chances are, your IT department has already developed (or is working hard to develop) a “bring your own device” (BYOD) strategy to keep up with workers’ embrace of tablets and smartphones. And BYOD is a revolving door for a telecommuting plan (I like to say the flip side of BYOD is THYW, for “take home your work”).

It’s a mix of managerial structure and quantifiable goals with teleworker flexibility that provides peak happiness for bosses and staffers alike. It’s not rocket science. It isn’t even bingo.

Of Course Trump Could Break the Internet, but Should He ?

The first true social-media-era terrorist organization, Daesh, skips and skims through the Internet, using it to set fires in Paris, San Bernardino, and beyond. It’s a terribly difficult strategy to counter, and once again, in his ham-handed way, Donald Trump is opening up an interesting debate with an initially

impractical idea to counter it. Trump’s initial statement in the December 15 Republican presidential debate was that “I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody.” He later dialed it back to imply more conventional hacking, spying, and cyberwarfare, but of course it opened up the questions of whether we can shut down “their” Internet—and whether we should.

In a fascinating investigation, Der Spiegel figured out how Daesh gets its online access: through satellite dishes purchased in Turkey and connected to EU satellite providers. Those dishes all have GPS locators on them, so Der Spiegel figured out where they are. According to the publication, “Many of the satellite dishes are located in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, which isn’t completely under the control of the terror regime, but other locations of the dishes include Raqqa, the unofficial IS headquarters, al-Bab, Deir al-Zor and along the Euphrates River into Iraq and the IS-occupied city of Mosul.”

The locations of the satellite dishes are known. The ISPs are known. They could be shut down, if these ISPs chose to do so. So why don’t they? There are other, more arcane ways to dump traffic from IP blocks and make ISIS’s life difficult. But such solutions, advocated by Trump, Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart.com, and others rest on the dangerous assumption that the Internet is “our Internet.” To some extent, that’s true for now; U.S. companies have an inordinate amount of control over the naming and routing of Internet servers and traffic. But that’s an accident of history, and it’s not a fixed fact.

The Chinese government has established, essentially, an Internet just for that country, with filters around its borders. We in the Englishspeaking world seem not to marvel at that daily because China’s Internet is in Chinese, we can’t read Chinese, and they aren’t particularly interested in exporting their homegrown services. But China already broke the Internet, in China. American influence over the rest of the Internet has been maintained by a quiet agreement that the folks doing it so far have done pretty well, and that breaking it for reasons of national pride or control—unless you’re China—is more trouble than it’s worth. But as soon as a U.S. president starts unilaterally blacklisting chunks of the Internet, other countries will feel abused and colonized, and they’ll break their own Internet. There will be a European Internet, and a Russian Internet, and a Middle Eastern Internet, all with their own policies and their own controls, and there will be no more global market for our U.S. software and services firms—never mind the end of the radical global free speech decade we’ve been having.

Breaking the Internet that way is a one-timeonly deal. Daesh could rebuild its connectivity, tapping into the Internet connections in neighboring states and concealing its location more artfully. We would never be able to rebuild our influence, or the overall freedom of the Web. The Der Spiegel article proposes a smarter idea. “Perhaps the companies have full knowledge of who is using their services and are sharing that information with intelligence services. That would mean that intelligence services have been listening in for years, even as IS continued growing in strength.”

The Internet is not a one-way path; it’s a valuable source of intelligence from which we would be cutting ourselves off. There are forms of cyberwarfare we can conduct without shattering the entire Internet, as well. Targeted viruses can be sent in to cause chaos, the way Stuxnet (a joint Bush-Obama project, if you can believe that) apparently did in Iran.

Cyberwarfare is an invisible and often secret capability. As we fight against an Internet-native enemy, it has to be a core capability—and yet, its successes are often not made public. There’s no satellite-viewable carnage, no YouTubed bombings. In other words, you have to trust in the competence of the government that is conducting your cyberwarfare campaign. You have to trust it will be not only aggressive, but more technically competent than its opponents. One of the top questions for this year’s presidential candidates should be: Whom do you trust to do so?

Panasonic Enters the Body Camera Fray

I’d rather be shot with a Panasonic than a Taser. Wouldn’t you? Driven by recent high-profile police shootings, body cameras are spreading across U.S. police departments. About a third of the 18,000 police forces in the U.S now use body cams, according to a report from B2B seller Insight that was commissioned by the cross-governmental U.S. Communities organization, and President Obama has requested funding for 50,000 more cameras.
Panasonic’s brand-new Arbitrator BWC, released on December 1, is a big name stepping into a market dominated by two other firms, VieVu and Taser. Panasonic says that its advantage comes from being an actual maker of cameras and in having an end-to-end system for data management and storage, which Panasonic has been working on for the past decade with its police dashboard camera systems.
The police body cameras aren’t just ruggedized GoPros. Although they record optically stabilized 720p video just like a GoPro, the difference really comes in how the footage is handled once it’s recorded, said Panasonic video solutions specialist John Cusick. Videos are encrypted in the camera, and every time they’re transferred to another device, they’re revalidated. Once they’re transferred from the camera— either wirelessly, or by dropping them into a charging cradle—they can only be viewed in special software that logs every view and edit action, keeping previous versions intact.
“We’re very cognizant of that chain of custody, that integrity,” Cusick said. “If it ever gets to court, if it gets challenged, we’ve done the job of documenting at the bit level the security of the file.”
Panasonic also sells a complete system including both body cameras and the more common dash cameras, with footage that can be stored in the same Microsoft Azure–powered government cloud and viewed with the same Windows software.
In the future, body cameras may be combined with facial recognition software, although Panasonic didn’t explicitly make the connection. The company showed us—separately, mind you—a facial recognition system called FacePro, which recognizes suspects in real time. It’s currently being marketed to companies and universities that want to watch for known thieves or disgruntled employees, but I can see how it could be combined with body cameras down the line.


DATA POCALYPSE
The proliferation of cameras is making data storage and management a major issue for police departments. In Harrison, New Jersey, cops spend three-fifths of their day looking at and managing digital evidence, Sergeant Dave Doyle of the Harrison Police Department said. Here’s how it works out. Each camera captures about 1GB per hour. (The cameras typically carry 32GB SD cards.) Data retention policies mean that departments need to keep data anywhere from six months to seven years, according to Joe Nigro, digital property custodian for the Harrison PD.
How much data gets recorded depends on department policy. The CEO of VieVu, Steve Ward, said that most officers in the field only record 60-90 minutes of video each day, because they only turn the cameras on when there’s an incident.
So a smaller city like Harrison, which may have 15 cops on the streets at any one time, would generate at least 15GB per day, or 5.4TB per year. Doyle said his department is set for local storage right now, but demands are only going to continue to grow, and departments are looking at adopting cloud solutions like Microsoft’s.
“The greatest concern of police departments moving forward now are servers, cloud storage, who’s going to manage this, and whether we have the proper encryption,” Doyle said.

MOST COPS LOVE CAMERAS
At the Panasonic event, Joe Giberson, chief of police for Stafford, NJ, sang the cameras’ praises. His department doesn’t currently use body cameras, but his officers have dash cams that automatically turn on with a car’s alert lights, recording speed, position, and video information.
“I wouldn’t have a police car out on the street without this system in it,” Giberson said.
This is New Jersey, so it’s not like the Stafford Township police officers are without controversy; the department is currently embroiled in a lawsuit over whether the town’s mayor used the police as a weapon to intimidate a political opponent. But if anything, that makes Giberson’s faith in cameras even more telling because he sees it as a way to prove that, most of the time, the cops are right. The dash cams have reduced complaints against his cops, because frivolous complaints are less likely to pop up when people know you have video, and they work wonders in certain circumstances.
“In DUI cases, as soon as a defense attorney sees the video, they’re ready to make a deal,” Giberson said.

Top Quality Wireless Music Starts With Sonos

Sonos is alive and well in 2015, despite attempts on its life from AirPlay (which has seen better days) and Bluetooth (which is enjoying its best days thus far). Sonos thrives because it doesn’t just make wireless speakers, it makes an entire wireless speaker ecosystem that functions quite well and, most important, delivers excellent sound. The second-generation Play:5 delivers ferocious power with seriously deep bass (when the mix calls for it) and a solid balance of rich lows and crisp highs. We’d be pleased if this were simply a standalone speaker, but it is part of a larger, non-Bluetooth-equipped, whole. Granted, purchasing this speaker means buying into the Sonos ecosystem, but it’s hard to imagine a better-sounding building block for a wireless multi-room system.

DESIGN
Available in black or white models, both of which have black front panels consisting of speaker grilles, the Play:5 has a minimal and sleek look; it seems meant to blend into a setting, not stand out. Measuring 8 by 14.3 by 6 inches (HWD) and weighing 14 pounds, the Play:5 has all its buttons on the top panel: one for Play/Pause and volume controls on either side. The volume controls are capacitive—each looks more like four tiny pinholes than a button, and it’s almost surprising when they work so well. From a visual standpoint, it keeps the top surface looking uncluttered. The volume levels work in conjunction with the master volume levels in the Sonos app. Furthermore, the volume controls act as track navigation tools when you swipe from one to the other. It’s a simple, smart design that makes the most of the speaker’s surface. Behind the grille, the Play:5 boasts three tweeters and three midrange drivers that are all driven individually by six class-D digital amplifiers. The back panel, where the power cable plugs in, also houses an Ethernet cable connection (for a direct network connection) and a Join button for connecting the speaker to an already-present Sonos system. There is also a 3.5mm aux input to which the speaker will automatically switch when it detects a signal (though no 3.5mm audio cable is included). Sonos claims the Play:5 can adjust its audio performance based on the acoustics of the room it’s in. There’s undoubtedly some digital signal processing going on here, but it’s subtle enough that purists likely won’t be irked, and it will please everyone else. The speaker can also be paired with another Play:5 to make a stereo pair, with one acting as the left channel and the other as the right. Sonos even claims the speakers are designed to work in relatively heightened humidity, so you can place the Play:5 in a bathroom and not worry about steam ruining it (the speaker is not water- or splash-proof, however).

WIRELESS AUDIO
Sonos was one of the first big names in Wi-Fi multi-room audio, and it’s stayed committed to the concept. The Play:5 doesn’t support Bluetooth; if you want to use the speaker without relying on the 3.5mm auxiliary input, you’ll need to use the free Sonos app for Android, iOS, OS X, and Windows, and connect the Play:5 to your home Wi-Fi network. Fortunately, this is a simple process of following a few software prompts and watching the speaker’s indicator light. All music playback is controlled through the app, which, thanks to Sonos’ constant development, now supports a startling number of streaming music services. You can listen to music from Amazon Music, Google Play, Pandora, SiriusXM, Spotify, Tidal, and dozens of others. The speaker also supports playing any of your locally stored music from up to 16 different storage devices on your network, and can access more than 100,000 streaming Internet radio stations outside of the different apps. It’s a safe bet that, even without Bluetooth as a backup, the Play:5 has you covered for your favorite music sources. The app handles all of the aforementioned multi-room and multi-speaker setups, including pairing two Play:5 speakers or playing music across multiple rooms. You can have up to 32 Sonos speakers on a single network at a time.

PERFORMANCE
On tracks with intense sub-bass content (we tested The Knife’s “Silent Shout”), the Play:5 delivers some serious thunder. Not only can this system get exceptionally loud, but the bass does not distort even at top volumes. That said, things certainly sound a bit more balanced at more moderate, sane listening levels. At a medium-loud volume, the Play:5 produces robust, deep bass. It also still provides a strong sense of bass response even at low volume levels, which is rare. Bill Callahan’s “Drover,” a track with less in the way of deep bass content, gives us a better idea of the Play:5’s overall sound signature. The system’s drivers definitely have the capability to boost the drums to unnaturally hefty levels the way some bass-forward systems tend to do, but instead the drums sound full and powerful without getting boosted in the deep lows. The Play:5 beautifully highlights the rich presence in the low mids of Callahan’s baritone vocals, and complements with a solid presence in the high mids. The guitar strums on “Drover” also benefit from the strong highmid presence, and from some extra brightness in the highs. This is a slightly sculpted, but balanced, sound signature. On Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” the kick drum loop’s attack gets plenty of that high-mid treble edge, retaining its sharp contour so it can slice through the mix. This track highlights what the Play:5 is capable of on deep bass—when the sub-bass synth hits occur, it sounds as if there’s a powerful subwoofer in the room. But the Play:5 avoids adding deep bass when it isn’t in the mix. And when there is exceptionally powerful deep bass present, as there is on this track, the Play:5 really brings it. On the opening scene in John Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary, the higher-register strings, brass, and vocals own the spotlight—they sound crisp and articulate through the Play:5. When there is lower-register instrumentation, it is delivered in a balanced manner, and the occasional subbass sound gets the appropriate level of presence in the mix. Absolute purists might find things a bit too boosted in the lows, but most listeners will find the overall mix crisp, rich, and well balanced. The main reason Sonos has remained relevant is the continuous improvement of its speaker lineup. Simply put, Play speakers sound great. If you’re looking for a top-quality wireless speaker, but don’t need the multi-zone capability, consider the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Wireless ($699) or the Bang & Olufsen Beolit 15 ($599); for something more affordable, try the Marshall Stanmore ($399) or Audioengine B2 ($299). If you want to start a bit smaller and much less expensive—and also less powerful—Sonos’ Play:1 ($199) is a fine choice. At $500, the Play:5 isn’t cheap, but it doesn’t sound, look, or behave like a cheap system. Sonically, it’s a winner, and from a multi-room home audio standpoint, Sonos still leads the pack.