by William Van Winkle		  
 
I Don’t Know of any Veteran journalists in the PC business who haven’t become cynics. How could we not? Have you read a press release recently? These are short documents put out by manufacturers as “information” for the press announcing this or that. Every once in a while, some company will hire me to write press releases, and it’s much harder than you’d think. We have to fabricate statements from vice presidents so banal, so terminally meaningless, that no real human could have possibly said them. We can’t describe anything about anything beyond the barest superficiality. Press releases have made industry clichés—“we listen to our customers,” “adding value through innovation,” “delivering the future of technology now”—into something so plain and asinine that they can be taught via webinar, and yet manufacturers continue to treat these as holy documents passed down from on high.

That’s my problem. You have a similar problem: channel marketing. With so much new technology coming into play constantly, there is no way any reseller can hope to stay on top of everything. You rely on manufacturers and distributors to tell you what’s important. They educate you sufficiently so you can pass this knowledge on to your customers and persuade them to buy suitable products.

Of course, we live in a capitalistic society, which is wonderful in its benefits but treacherous in that it’s every man for himself. Resellers receive a tremendous amount of misinformation, fallacious messages aimed at building markets where no markets should exist, and hype for products that never should have progressed beyond the prototype stage. Examples? I’m no Dave Letterman, but let’s try a quick Top 10 list.

10. Wireless peripherals. Web cameras and speakers come to mind. Now, you won’t find a bigger Logitech fan than me. That company practically walks on water in my opinion. That’s why I was so stoked when I received a test sample of the new Z-5450 speakers ($499), the first PC 5.1 speaker set with wireless rear satellites. Amazing! At last, I could dispense with that pair of wires snaking around my U-shaped desk. But when I unpacked the set, I discovered that the slender speaker wire going into each rear satellite had been replaced by a thicker cable. Sure, the data stream gets to the speaker wirelessly, but now I have a fat power cable sitting at shin-height between the corner of my desk and the wall, right where I walk about 30 or 40 times a day. Duh. (However, the Z-5450s sound frickin’ incredible.) And wireless cameras? Come on—it’s still wired to the outlet! So much for giving me the flexibility to hide the camera somewhere unobtrusive.

9. Wireless networking. I can’t tell you how sick I am after years of dead spots. When I built my house last year, I paid thousands of extra dollars, plus 30 years of interest on top, for nine Gigabit-ready CAT5e drops throughout the house, including one in the garage. HD streaming over 802.11? Get a grip. One of the best sales opportunities I can think of for resellers is to do a site survey inside a high-end consumer’s home and illustrate with bandwidth and signal strength results just how lame ordinary wireless networking can be. I mean, I just had a Sony PSP that couldn’t connect to my Netgear router 15 feet away. String the wires, baby. It’s the only way to fly.

8. Home office VoIP. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, once I turned on the TV, I knew why my Internet connection was essentially dead. Every connected person on the planet was pounding the news sites. On August 29th, 2005, history sort of repeated itself. As America watched the Hurricane Katrina disaster unfold, there were several Vonage customers I needed to talk with for deadlines, and every one of them sounded like they were on weak cell phone connections trapped in a deep tunnel. In other words, it was a garbled, unintelligible mess. Now that there are a slew of communication peripherals coming out for home VoIP, put all that hype on hold and make sure your customers don’t depend on the network for their critical communications. If so, POTS (plain old telephone service), while it costs twice as much or more, may still be the better solution.

7. “You can always upgrade!” We all know the stats. The average PC gets turned over every three years. Enthusiasts upgrade their PCs. Personally, I used the same chassis for nearly a decade while every component within it changed numerous times before my internal drive count finally forced me to upgrade. I think the last time I started with a new PC from scratch was in 1987. But this isn’t how most consumers and businesses operate. They pass their systems on to someone lower down the ladder (kids, interns, whatever) and buy new boxes. So all that hype about the longevity of the Socket 939 platform? Affordable analog flat panels? Affordable power supplies? And the upgradeability of SLI? New architectures, changing SKUs, and time itself will wipe all of these things away. Do you really think you can find the same GPU you sell today available for sale in two years? When I think back to how much I criticized HP, Dell, Packard Bell, IBM, and the rest for having proprietary designs in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I was really just being a clone snob. Nobody whines (too much) about notebooks being proprietary. Upgradeability is not always the great wonder we’re told it is.

6. The living room PC (HTPC). During the rise and reign of Shuttle’s XPC, small form factor boxes were supposed to be the solution for planting a computer next to your amplifier and running video output to your TV. But cube PCs turned out to have very low wife approval factors. Now Shuttle’s back with the Pentium M-based M1000, and I think this is a harbinger of what living room PCs will be: set-top boxes. But we all know that set-tops either come from service providers or companies like TiVo. The Xbox 360 is proof that the media extender model is all you need for getting data into the living room. Plant those terabytes in the basement. Stick a couple of UPnP NAS boxes in your closet. If you can pipe music and videos into your living room from a remote PC, you can also pipe in Word and Photoshop via some Remote Desktop-ish technology. The living room PC is costly, unwieldy, and unnecessary. The minute that software can efficiently do hardware’s job, that hardware is dead. Your job is to help build the infrastructure for and deploy that software.

5. Dumb network storage. This was the year that SOHO network storage devices got their big break. So here are all these customers with their hundreds of gigs of ripped movies and music and photos just dying to move stuff over to the network. The device manufacturers, every one of them, built their boxes with 10/100 Ethernet. Try to transfer 10GB over a 10/100 connection and see how long it takes. Just remember to pack a lunch. I asked a couple of these manufacturers why they didn’t go Gigabit. “Because nobody uses Gigabit.” Uh huh. That’s why most mainstream and up motherboards on the market now offers integrated GbE and why my home builder in 2004 only offered CAT5e (100Mbps) structured wiring and not CAT5. Secondly, why, oh why, not make these devices available to the network as FTP servers? Find any router with a USB port, plug a USB hard drive into it, configure the port settings, and you’ve got an FTP server. Why not let network storage drives do the same thing? It would cost nothing to implement and it would be a great value-add.

4. RAW file support. Now that the mass of consumers actually understands what digital photography is all about, more and more buyers want higher quality images, and often this means shooting RAW files rather than JPEGs or TIFFs. RAW files capture data straight off the sensor at 12-bit color depth (JPEG is 8-bit) with no bias for some preset white balance, saturation, or anything else. RAW is raw. You don’t start killing data until that file hits the image editor. Great idea, right? Well, it would be even better if there were a RAW standard. Adobe tried to create one with the Digital Negative Specification (DNG), but many of the major camera manufacturers want nothing to do with it. Canon, Nikon, Sony, and others each have their own proprietary RAW formats, so you either use that company’s RAW editor or you pray that someone like Adobe wrote a plug-in for it. Any way you slice it up, it’s an example of good technology gone sour because of companies insistent that their way is the only way. And it’s not.

3. Portable multimedia players (PMPs). Now, I’m a gadget freak, and I love these things, but the video iPod, for reasons I detailed in a recent RAMpage mailing, is a stupid PMP. Creative’s new Zen Vision is an incredible PMP. Now, these devices cost anywhere from $200 to $800, so they better deliver some serious value. But who needs them? Well...people who commute on trains and buses...and...kids in the back seat on road trips...and... OK, I’m stumped. Really, these devices were made for airplane travel, and if you think you can enjoy a two-hour movie on an iPod screen, knock yourself out. Overall, this is great technology. I just don’t see why anyone would buy it.

2. Hot hardware, hold the follow-through. A certain motherboard manufacturer recently went to market with a new design that was radically different from everybody else in the business. The PR guy sent me info, got on the phone with me, gushed and gushed about it, and I agreed to review it. When I finally got it on my bench, I had 24 hours until deadline, and it didn’t work. Like, I powered it up, went into the BIOS, the display turned to garbage, and it was dead. The manufacturer said it could overnight me a replacement, but—ahem—there was a very good chance the next one would turn out the same way. The next month, said vendor persuaded me to review the next revision, which was supposed to be “bulletproof.” It wouldn’t even load Windows. “But!” the manufacturer protested. “We’re demonstrating what amazing technology we can develop.” “But!” I replied. “No one gives a damn about your technology if it doesn’t work!” I can’t begin to list all of the bleeding-edge hardware I see that arrives with immature software/firmware support. We’re all supposed to swallow the hype. Innovation is the road to salvation. Stability can follow...someday.

1. The blue laser battle. As a latchkey kid, I spent so much time with the family Betamax that I literally memorized all of Star Wars, the Buck Rogers movie, and all nine hours of the “Shogun” mini-series. When VHS took over, I lost all my shows, and life was never quite the same. The affair left me with deep-seated issues about technology format wars. This is why I have such dread over the coming Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD madness. I don’t want to lose my movies again. And what really stinks is that I shouldn’t have to. The movie industry is going to lose untold millions of dollars over consumer paralysis because nobody will know which format to buy. Personally, I’m tempted to just pass. “For us it’s not the physical format,” Bill Gates said in a recent interview with the Daily Princetonian. “Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything’s going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it’s even unclear how much this one counts.” Sure, once discs are gone, it will become an issue over whose DRM scheme gets used, and we’re on to another format battle. But I’d rather gamble $5 on DivX or WMV-HD than $50 on yet another copy of the Star Wars trilogy. Better yet, I’d rather pay a flat monthly rate and just stream any HD movie with accompanying extras I please. I could use the extra shelf space, too.		  
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