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JMB Communications Writing Sample: Magazine Article

The Road Warrior Army: Are You Signed Up?

Editor's Note: Although this story was written a few years ago, the information about laptop security is as potentially valuable to laptop users today as it was then....JMB, 4/01

"Mobile computing is changing the face of business." It’s an expression we’ve all heard for years. The difference is that today, it’s for real.

Competition is the reason.

In the 1980s – when some people say excess was the norm in business – many companies overstaffed and overspent and gave not much more than lip service to things like efficiency, competitive positioning, and customer orientation/customer satisfaction.

Then, as the country abruptly switched from the Cold War to a peacetime economy, the financial bottom fell out of business. Bankruptcies, consolidations, reorganizations, and layoffs soared. Suddenly companies had to "compete" -- not to succeed but merely to survive.

Efficiency was in. Responding to customers was in. "Lean and mean" was in. Using technology to beat the competition was in.

The first laptops were crude, slow, heavy monochromatic machines used as glorified note-taking devices by government officials, journalists and by engineers and a handful of other souls characterized, as one observer put it, by an excess of bravery and an enormous amount of patience. These Neanderthalic behemoths emerged in the middle of the 80s boom years.

A taste of what could be. Those early laptops were shoulder-breaking torture, with heavy, quick-dying batteries and the speed of a severely overweight pigeon with a wing missing. But they did give users a taste of what could be: they added the element of portability to critical blocks of information. Whether used for simple DOS-based word processing or cumbersome spreadsheet programs, early systems did the job – even if they did throw a lot of shoulders out of kilter.

They did one other thing, too: they became a greenhouse for the germination of ideas about what could be done, if only the medium were brought to its real potential. When the questions starting getting answered, laptop sales soared, and that sales explosion shows no signs of decelerating.

The difference between those machines and today’s is startling. Instead of operating at a barely perceptible MHz level, today’s laptops typically run at 133 MHz or better, with 133 MHz machines rapidly moving to close-out specialists. Typical systems today include both a floppy drive and a hard drive of at least a gigabyte capacity, plus a CD-ROM drive, internal speakers, and 24 MB or so of EDO memory. Price: now under $2000, although screamers with active matrix displays still sell for $3000 or more. Lithium ion batteries last four to six hours. And the lightest laptops weigh only about four pounds.

Although most laptops are Windows 95-based, a steady but small percentage uses Apple technology. Windows NT, the new darling of corporate computing, now has a growing presence on laptops – and its growth there is accelerating.

Some high-end systems even use superfast Alpha microprocessors from Digital – 300 MHz fast, or faster.

The single most significant driver behind Sales Force Automation (SFA) – a huge laptop market which is still really in its infancy – is that SFA enables sales people to capitalize on a means for beating competition. Laptops used in SFA provide road warriors with:

• Immediate information access around the clock, around the world, from anywhere (their cars, phone booths, customer offices, vacation retreats, boats, anywhere).
• Secure access to confidential information on corporate intranets – around the clock, around the world.

Laptops enable technicians, physicians, scientists, sales people, students, product support people, police and others to obtain, use, modify, and act upon information, and to communicate with anyone, virtually anywhere, from anywhere, instantly.

Consider this example. Laptop-carrying sales reps entering customers’ or prospects’ offices expecting sales are often hit with the third degree:

• "I’m not paying that much. You’ve got to do better."
• "I want it delivered Friday. If you can’t deliver it Friday, I’ll find someone who can."
• "It doesn’t have an XY widget. Can you add one?
• How fast can you redesign this so we can use it in our new system?"

When sales people are peppered with questions which they may not have anticipated, their ability to respond quickly to customer demands – which laptops facilitate -- can mean the difference between a sale or an irate boss.

In response to the "third degree" questions in this example, laptops enable Road Warriors to:

• Check prospective price adjustments against profit margins or with the boss, instantly, so price-sensitive customers can be sold at a profitable level – or not at all.
• Check inventory to assure on-time delivery. Some systems allow reps who are working with customers in customers’ offices to configure systems, adjust prices, order products, and set delivery and setup schedules – all in real time.
• Access the corporate intranet either by direct dial-in connection or via an internet tunnel to update designs, order parts, and schedule assembly and delivery.

For companies, it’s expensive to create mammoth dial-in networks which are the infrastructure underpinning SFA. Long-distance charges alone can be colossal.

That is why companies like Norwood, Massachusetts-based Microcom, now a unit of Compaq Computer, are marketing solutions which enable users to create secure "tunnels" through the internet. These "Virtual Private Networks," or VPNs as Microcom calls them, leverage the inherent wide availability and low cost of Internet access through ISPs such as TIAC. The technology ensures secure, easy, fast, confidential access to corporate Intranets from anywhere. Since ISP’s infrastructures are used to make the connections, company networking investments are minimal and end-user convenience is substantial: wherever there’s an ISP, there can be relatively easy, secure access to the corporate Intranet.

Many companies are using such tunneling technologies to accelerate SFA without blowing their shrinking MIS budgets. It’s an option that’s particularly attractive to companies with many traveling executives or technicians or sales people or contractors who must have secure access at reasonable cost.

Of course, SFA isn’t the only place where laptop use is exploding. Their small size and easy portability make them an ideal choice for anti-terrorist bomb disposal teams.

The disposition of illegal bombs has become as "high tech" as a lot of other things. Thousands of different types of bombs are now cataloged on CD-ROMs, which makes it easier (as opposed to "easy") for bomb disposal teams to use CD-ROM-equipped laptops to determine which type of bomb they’re trying to de-fuse, and which wires must be disconnected to prevent it from ruining what otherwise might be a perfectly boring day in the bomb disposal business. This use of laptops is literally a big-time life-saver.

There’s yet another example of laptop versatility going on in Eurasia. Reuters recently reported on a high-tech camel caravan which is retracing the ancient Silk Road from China to Europe. In a trip that started June 2 and will last 18 months through "some of the harshest parts of central Asia," the caravan will face droughts, floods, sandstorms, snowstorms, avalanches, and mudslides. Not your ordinary vacation.

Reuters noted that American filmmaker Paxton Winters is documenting the life of caravaneers, by describing their own lives during the trip. Of course, some of the chronicling is being done on laptops.

The expedition will use the laptops to send digital images and text by satellite to its Internet website while on route: the website is http://silkroad.turk.net/. They’re also reportedly getting e-mail at silkroad@turk.net.

Other current uses of laptops are decidedly less exotic. Look in the front seat of police cars today, and you’re liable to see a carefully mounted laptop next to the driver’s seat. Here, police can quickly check licenses and registrations. With the proper applications installed, investigators can access mug books or other criminal files, enabling them to remotely identify individuals under surveillance. Some law enforcement officials have far wider search capabilities installed.

Laptops can be used by consulting physicians to examine medical records and x-rays of patients halfway around the world as soon as the x-rays are dry and scanned into a distant computer. Consulting surgeons can advise the nature of abnormalities and propose proper surgical techniques from 10,000 miles away by using Internet tunneling, groupware or just plain e-mail with attached graphics files viewed on laptops, anywhere. Collaborative software such as Digital’s LinkWorks enables secure access via the Internet.

Products this versatile and productive are attractive to a spectrum of buyers. Unfortunately, they’re also attractive to thieves, who sometimes target traveling road warriors.

There are ways to lessen the risk that thieves will steal your laptop, however. Here are a few:

1. Don’t make it obvious in an airport or hotel that you’re carrying a laptop. Most laptop users carry their systems in a case especially made for laptops. Typically, such cases offer little physical protection, although they are a convenient way to carry systems. Suggestion: buy a rugged standard briefcase and transport your laptop in it. Make sure the laptop doesn’t bounce around (I use Toshiba’s small and flimsy form-fitting case plus foam rubber inside a nondescript but solid briefcase), and do use a shoulder strap. All of this lessens the likelihood you’ll stand out in a crowd.
2. Be careful with x-ray machines. Using a typical airport laptop scam, two thieves working together walk in front of you through a security checkpoint. As the second thief walks through, the alarm goes off – intentionally. He backs up. Meanwhile, your laptop comes out the other end of the security system, where the first thief casually picks it up and spirits it away. His partner – the guy in front of you – empties his pockets of metallic objects and goes through security again, this time successfully. Then you go – and your computer is nowhere in sight.

In crowded security areas, I always demand hand-inspection of my laptop. Security will argue the point but they ultimately give in. Caution: make sure your batteries are charged, since they will ask you to turn it on to ensure that isn’t a bomb…. (Bottom line: Never let the system out of your sight.)

3. Unattended laptops sometimes disappear from perfectly normal hotel rooms even in the best hotels. Take it with you or deposit it in the hotel safe to ensure its safety. "Hiding" laptops in hotel rooms is pointless; sophisticated computer thieves do their homework and know the best hiding places.
4. Use available security devices! There are some good ones. Kensington lock terminals built into most new laptops enable you, with optional aftermarket cables, to hook them to a bed or some other immovable object in your hotel room, where thieves can’t snatch them.

• The DefCon 1 Notebook Computer [Alarm] Security System, from Port. For about $50, this battery-powered device sends off a 110-decibel screech if anybody grabs your laptop. (Like car alarms, you can set it off accidentally, too.)
• Computer Security Products Inc. (www.ComputerSecurity.com) provides the cables mentioned earlier. Chaining your laptop to a hotel bedpost may seem kinky, but it should slow even the burliest of hoodlums.
• CompuTrace is perhaps the most ingenious laptop security device on the market. Something akin to a LoJack for laptops (LoJack is the tradename for an automotive theft deterrent and retrieval system operated by police), CompuTrace theft retrieval software periodically and silently calls a monitoring center. The computer’s serial number and originating telephone number are logged automatically. If your laptop is stolen, you call the monitoring center and your system is placed on alert. Claims the company: The next time your stolen computer’s modem is connected to a phone line, its tracing system immediately pinpoints the location of the stolen computer. The Theft Recovery Team coordinates recovery with local police to return your hardware and data. The company claims the product is both undetectable and indestructible. The computersecurity.com site noted earlier gives you CompuTrace information.

We’ve all witnessed first-hand the warp-speed progress of personal computer technology in the past several years. Until recently, laptops lagged behind desktops in speed and brawn by about a year, but that gap is nearly closed. Moreover, laptop prices have dropped precipitously, though not as much as desktops. There’s every reason to think this trend will continue, with the gap narrowing further.

We spoke with several top PC makers. Although none would talk specifically about future products, the conversations made clear where some manufacturers are going:

• Portability. The laptop’s biggest advantage is that you can do anything anywhere with it. How about working on your corporate LAN from a rowboat in midsummer in the Northwest Territories, where the nearest cell site is hundreds of miles away? Future laptops will operate for days on far smaller, lighter batteries, and will weigh a fraction of what they do now because of advances in material, electrical efficiency, and underlying technology. Some will get power from the sun and will keep in touch with the world through satellite uplinks. (Don’t expect this for Christmas.)
• Durability. There have been loud complaints about laptop fragility. Unlike long-abused American Tourister suitcases, laptops have no sense of humor when it comes to being abused. Manufacturers are working to make them tougher, but how tough remains to be seen.
• Batteries. Some of the newest laptops can scream along at 200 MHz for close to six hours. If you need more than that, either buy another battery or take yourself less seriously. Several airlines are now installing electrical outlets in business class seats, which will make things a lot easier.
• HDD/RAM. Disk drives will get much bigger and RAM will increase markedly, as you’d expect. Optical drives may play a role depending on material durability, and memory technology is already starting to change. Newer memory technologies will gradually replace DRAM, greatly speeding applications performance.
• Smile. Computer telephony is already here. Didn’t you think a thimble-size TV camera might be embedded in your next laptop? Video conferencing hits Northwest Territories. Imagine. . .

Copyright ©, JMB Communications, 2001, 1999, 1997.

Updated April 19, 2001