Why can't the fax machine die?
callmeed.posterous.com
callmeed.posterous.com
The fax use case is: a businessperson needs to walk to a machine, lay a stack of 50 sheets down, punch in an address and let the machine do the rest. Oh, so you say some scanners/copiers can email? Let's go over the problems with email.
- dealing with attachments
- attachment filetype; no enforceable standard by the recipient
- inboxes overflowing
- smtp servers rejecting messages over a certain unknown size
- mailserver administration
- chews through Internet bandwidth; no built-in throttling
- spam
- spam false positives, dropped messages
- no ability to reliably confirm delivery
- recipient has to print document, for full fax simulation
I'm actually amazed there has been no Internet standard that has emerged for this: pushing a large document in some standard format to an Internet-connected client computer (laptop or desktop, not dedicated server) for immediate viewing/printing. The cynic in me says the anti -P2P movement had a lot to do with it, since a P2P file transfer is about as close as we have to fax functionality (albeit with some problems of its own). There are obviously many ways to cobble together HTTP, FTP, SFTP, XMPP, etc. to imitate this use case, but none really come close to the plug-it-in-and-hit-start ease of fax machines.
Email works significantly better than fax: it just appears to have more problems due to volume of electronic mail.
not that i like fax, but the experience you get with the average office supply store fax machine is a poor one.
- dealing with attachments (no high quality images via fax)
- attachment filetype (speed negotiation)
- clean paper underflowing
- fax machine runs out of memory and rejects a too large fax without confirmation on the other side
- phone line administration
- takes a phone line / number
- spam (also exists via fax)
- spam false positives (if you have enough people in the office, someone will file your message into the bin by accident one day)
- if you really really care, you can actually call the recipient of your email, which will work the same way the fax does
- recipient must print the fax even if it's spam, one sentence, or something that has to be typed in again and forwarded by email
Both emails and faxes "just work" most of the time. They're really quite similar after all.
This means warrants, contracts, etc hold up on court where a document that is emailed and printed off will not.
This is not a particularly good reason - but that is the bottom line.
There are definitely electronic forms of contracts that are legal without me ever having to put an ink pen on a dead tree.
I bought car insurance from Geico entirely online. Never signed anything or faxed anything. Just typed in my initials and checked some boxes ... only thing I had to print was the card that goes in my glove box.
Fax is still immensely important when dealing with credit applications, leases, etc.
Also in many places documents you print with an inkjet printer are not technically legal.
The laws regarding the technologies are mostly really dumb but that is what you usually get when law and technology meet.
I can say on good authority, as I paid lawyers good money for the legislation ( http://tinyurl.com/3xwvf5a ) and pertinent case-law research, that (commercially) emails with e-sigs in VA are just as good, in some cases, MUCH better than faxes due to the header meta-information.
What constitutes an "e-sig" under the Commercial Code of Virginia can also be very simple (nothing more than a "/s/ <full name> <title> <date>" line in documents) provided that both parties agree apriori that "sufficient notice" can be given over email.
Given the pace of business these days, to a first-order approximation, we simply won't do any kind of volume work with a client, vendor, or partner that doesn't support electronic document authorization. Faxes really are dinosaurs. We still maintain a dedicated fax line, but to my knowledge, it's not be utilized for over 4 years.
Many of these barely have a working fax machine, much less email. We email documents directly whenever we can, and have abstracted faxing away using a print-to-fax server, and incoming faxes to emails. Things have changed quite a bit in the past few years; I would estimate we have close to 50% email adoption among independent truckers. Even still, our systems send hundreds of faxes a day at peak time.
I just feel absurd for doing this while I work at the epicenter of technology in order to put a little cash into a startup that wants to go revolutionize some other part of the internet or technology or whatever.
I may as well be rubbing sticks together to start a fire.
"[ ... ] can we all finally agree that fax machines are a bad idea? I print a digital document from my computer onto a sheet of paper, perhaps scribble something on it, then stick it into this machine that scans it back into a digital document for transmission. It's then sent somewhere else in order to be printed onto a sheet of paper, which is then handed to some minimum-wage drone who has to type all the stuff back into a digital document so that the information can be dealt with and archived on the other end. Seriously. What the hell is up with that?"
I don't think anything is going to kill the fax any time soon. But Google could easily make its existence much less annoying--which may just be the first phase of its death.
Better answer: I've thought about this problem a lot. I think the concept of the fax machine itself isn't really the issue, it's the fact that it hasn't evolved from communicating via a 19.2K modem over POTS lines. All the alternatives are replacement technologies that don't offer a migration path from the established standard and make it harder to replicate a physical document from A to B.
- The fax via email/web alternatives are harder to use because scanning and printing are separate and often difficult steps.
- FOIP isn't trivially backwards compatible - you need a gateway provider and a service agreement to send to existing machines.
I think Google's cloud print service need to extend to cloud scanning. As a first step you could then have multifunction scanner/printer/copiers that attempt to contact the recipient via IP first and then either fall back to regular fax or use a proxy fax service. IP connections would offer: higher speed, higher resolution, colour, encryption and wireless connectivity.
The key is something that's still as easy as a fax machine. Any solution that doesn't focus on copying physical documents is solving a different problem. We already have email for that.
I'm not objecting to packages, etc. But why do people still send me letters? If the IRS, employers, clients, etc., moved to fax I'd be happy. Fax has been around for 30-40 years and for some reason I keep mailing letters to people.
Why can't I have something that, when provided to USPS, FedEx, UPS, whatever, resolves to wherever I'm currently living? Every time I move I have to change a million different addresses with a million different people, invariably forgetting some along the way.
My email address never changes - why can't my physical address be like it.
Until the law (and custom) catches up, we'll be faxing stuff. And I should know, as I've tried to kill fax at several companies, only to be held back by the legal department.
At my current company (an insurance company), we hold as valid requests for policy renewal faxed in, or on a printed form, but due to the legal requirements we cannot accept any other electronic format, sadly (which would help greatly with automation). Legal dept. wants something that judges will accept as valid on contract disputes.
Every business has a fax machine, many still do not have email. I work with a lot of hotels, a large number of them do not have email, business is conducted via fax as it is the only option.