As businesses and individuals all around the world respond to the Covid-19 phenomenon, one of the phrases I’ve heard a lot over recent weeks is ‘So just work from home, then’. I have heard from some in the display supply chain that are trying to look on the bright side of things by suggesting that the demand for more notebooks, tablets and monitors, to work from home will drive demand back up. Sadly, I think that this is really ‘whistling in the wind’. Let’s look at the arguments for and against this idea.
First, it’s hard to believe that many companies haven’t already got plenty of people working from home already. I’ve been doing it, on and off, since I set up the company 25 years ago. It was one way of seeing the family when working the ridiculous hours needed to start up a business, but it also saved a lot of cost and hassle. It’s also not so technically tricky to do. We have a rack of heavy duty servers that run remote desktops that we can maintain and support that give access to the data we all need to share. Our staff dial in from wherever they are in the world using VPNs.
It works pretty well and allows staff to use any PC or system that can support the remote desktop client. Their stuff stays on their machine and our stuff stays on ours.
Resilience
Of course, you need reliable access and domestic internet service is often less reliable than corporate networks. To get around this, we use an ISP that is able to ‘bond’ channels together at their end and we have a special firewall at our end that can switch between the providers or usually uses both. Initially, we did this to bond together multiple ADSL connections. Typical browsing and home use needs a lot of download, but not much upload. By combining multiple cheal ADSL connections, we were able to get decent upload speeds without the very high cost of SDSL lines (which were priced very differently from ADSL mainly because they were only used by businesses).
These days, we use an FTTC provider based on the telephone network for one feed and we have a cable modem for the other. That means a very high level of redundancy and we rarely have interruptions to our connectivity. Anyway, back to displays!
A Notebook Boost?
It’s a long time since I switched from using a desktop PC to a notebook, but I’m something of a road warrior. However, for most routine office and data processing, relatively little power is really needed. Notebooks have been good enough for a long time and corporates have been issuing them for a long time. (Nearly forty years ago, my 1MHz 8 bit Apple ][ used to spend most of its time waiting for me to hit the keyboard and my latest PC does the same, although it waits much faster!)
There are also few households that do not have access to a PC or tablet that is able to run a remote desktop/thin client kind of app these days. You really don’t need much power for that.
(Having said that, in discussions with one of my daughters yesterday, she mentioned that her employer could actually help a lot of organisations through the crisis as it has a call centre that is experienced at handling different types of support, complaint and information services. However, staff are not equipped for operating from home. They need notebooks, connectivity, coordinated telephone systems. Of course, this could be sorted out, but how quickly? And how do you pay for it without being accused of profiteering from the crisis?)
A Boost in Monitor Sales?
As users found when netbooks (low cost notebooks with small displays) were a bit of a fashion, to make the most of a PC in an office application, you really do need display real estate, and reasonable resolution. As Dr Jon Peddie says “The more you can see, the more you can do”. So could working from home lead to more monitor sales?
In Europe, it definitely ought lead to more sales in theory. There is an EU directive (The Display Screen Directive) that mandates that for user health and safety, a separate monitor has to be used (well it’s slightly more complicated than that, but for these purposes, that’s the case). This only applies to “regular users”. So an executive doing an hour of catching up with email might not be a ‘regular user’ but if staff are asked to work full time on a PC, they are, without doubt, a “regular user”, so employers are obliged to ensure they have an appropriate display (big enough, good enough etc). They are also obliged to ensure adequate office-like ergonomics. So, on the face of it, that should lead to a big demand from big companies for monitors to ensure that employees working from home are not in breach of the Directive.
Each EU country has its own regulations to implement the EU Directive. You can buy this image as a poster : https://tinyurl.com/sghvbad
However, let’s get real about this! On the scale of things, no government is going to be worried about enforcing this regulation in the current climate. If, however, home working continues after the current crisis, it might start to be an issue.
Macroeconomics
Anyway, my overall view is that there is no chance of a boost in demand for notebooks and monitors in what is loosely called ‘the West’ in the next few months. The reality is that for a few months at least, the economic impact of this shock, combining as it has with a major drop in oil prices and the end of a long bull stock market, may be even more wider and severe than the 2008 crash. The PC market in the developed world is basically a replacement market these days. There’s almost nobody that needs or wants a PC that doesn’t have one (even though they may want a newer one).
Given the huge impact that lockdowns and other Covid-19-related actions will have, most of the routine replacements of PCs and IT equipment are bound to be postponed until the future looks clearer. Finance departments will be hanging onto their cash for as long as they can. So, in summary, I don’t think there will be a big boost in notebooks and monitors for home working. (BR)
