My favorite CEO adage by far is the tale of three envelopes. It is rumored that a new chief executive is presented with three envelopes by his predecessor. These notes of wisdom are designed to be opened in sequence in response to any serious crisis. The first letter directs the new leader to shift blame to the last CEO. The second envelope directs the CEO to re-organize and fire people. The last and final piece of advice on the third letter is to prepare three identical envelopes for the next guy. This urban legend may elicit a few snickers from the readers, but unfortunately for HP CEO Meg Whitman, it looks like she’s already cracked open two of her three envelopes. 

PC Manufacturers are working day and night to shrink Ultrabooks into impossibly thin new form factors, and one of the casualties of this push has been output display options. VGA and DVI made way for mini display port and HDMI, however even these smaller connectors take up precious space. Even if your laptop sports one, what if you want more than one external display? The answer my friends is DisplayLink. The proliferation of USB 3 on Intel’s new chipsets is making outputting to multiple monitors over USB much more than a hack, this could well be the future.