Okay, those are words I thought I’d never say.

I read an article about Ballmer a few months ago in which he said he had gone completely paperless. He used a laptop/tablet and various collaboration tools. That got me thinking. Paperless has been a stated goal of the computing industry for decades. Yet it remained on the horizon, like a mirage that never gets closer. I bet if you graphed consumption of printer paper over the years you’d see a steady increase, maybe even an acceleration. Years ago, a few weeks after Bill Gates famously hyped the paperless capabilities of an early tablet, he was seen taking notes in meetings with a pen and standard yellow pad. So much for paperless.

I figured that Ballmer is a pragmatic guy, and he did say, after all, that he had gone paperless, not that he was going to. So I thought I would give it a try. After a couple of months of working paperless (well, more precisely and to perhaps coin a term, lesspaper), I think a change may be in the air. I anticipated going paperless to be an annoyance, and I’m finding that I usually now prefer it. I discovered that marking up documents actually works better for me than writing on printouts. For starters, I and others can read what I wrote, which is sadly often not the case for my handwriting. I have access to the documents from any of several machines, and they provide a history of notes for future reference, whereas paper usually gets buried or thrown away. My notes are vastly easier to share with others.

This feels like an important time for computing, during which software vendors will have to rethink their products and how they are consumed. Paperless is one aspect of the changes that will have implications for the whole industry. It is our job to figure out those implications for IT and produce software that makes it possible for people to easily and securely benefit from these trends.

More on this another time…