Google, HelloFax, Expensify And Others Want You To Go Paperless In 2013
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
At the same time, there is so much tooling and infrastructure out there for print, that change is slow. There is a whole layer of increasingly senior managers from my generation who grew up with Microsoft Office, and are slow moving toward new reporting technologies. As a technologist this can be frustrating (see: http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic), but change is inevitable.
I think the consumer part of this technology cycle is pretty well played out, but there is still a lot to be done for businesses. I'm calling for the death of what I call the "PC operator," which many office workers are. I think the valley is going to catch on to this in the next year.
Then, for a startup I worked for, I said "Enough is enough. I'm going to automate this report for you and it will be so much better!" I was automating a 12-step Excel-macro-vlookup-pivot-table report. I was using python.
And boy was it a pain. Have you ever tried implementing pivot-table functionality in python? Holy smokes. (You can use numpy, but seriously don't add that as a production dependency if you can help it. There is some pivot table library but it doesn't actually do all the things real pivot tables do.)
First you filter on column A, then sort by column B, then vlookup, then pivot, then... oof. Shoot me now.
And don't get me started on matplotlib. It is theoretically great, but doesn't work on OSX, which is what I was using as my dev machine. What a cluster.
My point being that, in my limited experience, I really couldn't imagine a world where devs had to write tools to do things that Excel has been doing for decades! And without any intervention from the dev team too!
"Here," I said, "try this." I showed him HelloFax. That was a no-go, citing privacy concerns. How can he be sure they aren't stealing or saving his personal information? Even if their ToS says so, there's no way to know. And most faxes are for things like insurance, which have SSN's, etc.
"But you realize," I said, "that every fax you send nowadays is going to someone's email. Nobody is receiving physical faxes anymore." Sure, he said, but then he is no longer the one responsible.
He's savvy enough to read the news and read about awful terms of service changes, privacy breaches, and startups and services going out of business.
Plus, he reasons, what if you lose internet?
There's no substitute for a physical paper record. (What if the house burns down? Well, he has a scanned copy on his computer too. We could go on forever.)
And even if there was a substitute for a physical paper record, it is hard to give peace of mind to my old man about whether hard or soft copies are admissible in court. When are soft copies admissible in court anyway?
So unless some service (somehow) is able to give privacy peace of mind to my dad and address all of his issues... it is unlikely I would be able to convince him to move into this century with respect to his personal information, documents, and finances. What startup is solving that?
Paper is just another technology, and a very good one at that.
In our case, we can't go entirely paperless due to the government and lawyers. There are too many things we need to send snail-mail but here's hoping that changes.