Return of the paperless office

For the more youthful of you, I might need to explain that the ‘paperless office’ is something of a joke. It’s a good example of our tendency to be pretty off the mark when it comes to predicting the future. The arrival of computers was thought to mean that we wouldn’t need paper any more. Of course, the opposite happened.

The Economist has a very interesting couple of articles on this topic. It’s a reminder that technological change often has the power to surprise us.

The Economist article is at Technological comebacks: Not dead, just resting

As they explain, “it seemed obvious that more and more documents would be written, distributed and read in electronic form, rather than on paper. Filing cabinets would give way to hard disks, memos and reports would be distributed electronically and paper invoices and purchase orders would be replaced by electronic messages whizzing between accounts departments. What actually happened was that global consumption of office paper more than doubled in the last two decades of the 20th century.”

But the really interesting point is that – as the graph above shows – use of paper is at last beginning to fall. Does this mean the prediction was actually true: but it just took longer to get there than we realised? Are there other old predictions we have laughed off but could materialise?

Here are a few examples from the article. A good one is the internet itself. After the dotcom crash it was assumed that most internet business models were daft. But many dotcom business models had been based on everyone having broadband internet connections, which spread more slowly than expected. As broadband has grown, many predictions made during the boom—about the value of online advertising and the volume of e-commerce, for example—came true after all, albeit a few years late.

Another good example is the electric car. A plunge in the oil price in the late 1990s and the cancellation of the EV1 by General Motors in 2003 seemed to spell the end for electric cars. But growing concern about climate change, worries about energy security and a spike in the oil price have since effected an astonishing turnaround. Carmakers are now racing to build petrol-electric hybrid vehicles, and these are widely seen as steps on the way to all-electric ones.

Here’s another that the oldies laughed off: video phones. They have never taken off, despite the fact that it’s technically feasible. As The Economist says, “just as supermodels sparked a trend for carrying small bottles of mineral water around, perhaps a celebrity endorsement or a sudden teenage craze will trigger a wider social shift that prompts people to use the technology.”

What you’re being encouraged to think is that big shifts do happen and can happen fast. It’s just hard to predict them.

There’s more to read at The paperless office: On its way, at last