HIGH in the French Alps not far from the city of Grenoble, the photocopying giant Xerox mapped out its vision of the future earlier this month. It wasn鈥檛 quite what many observers expected.
It used to be fashionable to sing the praises of electronic documents and prophesy the imminent demise of boring old paper. Xerox has been leading the choir for as long as 30 years, and for most of that time it would have seemed unimaginable that as the company entered the 21st century it would be betting its future on paper.
But despite the prophets鈥� predictions, we seem to be using more paper than ever, and now Xerox thinks it is well placed to cash in on the trend. Its plan is to bridge the gap between electronic documents and their paper cousins and to make paper just as interactive and flexible as digital.
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It鈥檚 an ambitious goal, but one that Xerox might just pull off. The gap between paper and electronic documents has never been wider. Try scribbling notes in the margin of a PDF document, or searching for a keyword in a sheaf of printed papers.
Herv茅 Gallaire, the company鈥檚 chief technology officer, outlined the vision to journalists at the Xerox Research Centre Europe in the Alps. Documents, and the ways we use them, are evolving, and will continue to change, he said. As an example, he pointed to prototype software written by Xerox that searches the internet or a local network for the original, digital version of a paper printout. The idea is that you will scan the printout using a PC or a souped-up photocopier. The software will then look for the digital original, and place a copy in your personal files, perhaps along with other versions of the document such as translations into other languages. The company is working on software that can do the same thing for images, Gallaire says.
This new way of handling paper documents is an embodiment of a larger idea: that information should flow on and off printed pages as easily as it can be added to electronic documents or extracted from them. If you are looking for a document among a sheaf of papers, says Gallaire, the quickest way to find it will be to scan them all electronically and then skim through a set of summaries compiled by a computer.
For this to happen, paper documents will have to change, Gallaire says. Data about a document will be stored in tiny barcode-like 鈥済lyphs鈥� printed discreetly at the bottom of each page that a scanner will be able to pick up and interpret. These glyphs will contain information about a document鈥檚 history, its owner and how the data it contains is related to other documents: how cells on a spreadsheet are linked, for example.
Clearly, Gallaire鈥檚 vision amounts to little without the computing power to carry it out. He says that electronic devices will have to evolve if they are to work seamlessly together helping us cope with our ever-growing love of paper documents.
So a photocopier might send a document to a PDA via Bluetooth and a camera could scan an image to a PC. But he sees advanced photocopiers capable of carrying out all these tasks on large numbers of documents playing a central role in future offices. That鈥檚 where Xerox will lead the way, he says.
Whether Xerox can make this vision a reality remains to be seen. The company has fallen on hard times of late. It has dropped behind rival document companies such as Adobe, whose PDF format has become a de facto standard for electronic documents. Three years ago it was struggling to avoid bankruptcy.
That鈥檚 when it privatised Xerox Parc, the world-famous research laboratories in Palo Alto, California, from which emerged some of the company鈥檚 best ideas. Window-based computing, drop-down menus, scroll bars and the whole notion of cutting and pasting using a mouse were all dreamed up at Parc, but while Xerox concentrated on photocopying, other companies turned these ideas into some of the biggest business success stories in history.
In some ways, Xerox has been dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age. Perhaps it has now turned the corner. 鈥淴erox was a hardware company,鈥� admits Gallaire. 鈥淗owever, Xerox recognises the need to explore new spaces.鈥� This may be its last chance.
Pulp fiction鈥nd fact
Just who was first to predict the paperless office is difficult to say, but many fingers point towards George Pake, who ran the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California back in 1975. Events have proved him wrong. In 2002, the world鈥檚 offices used 43 per cent more paper than they did in 1999, according to a study published last month by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley.
The study examined the amount of new information created each year and the medium on which it is stored. The researchers expected to find that traditional forms of information storage, such as photographic film and paper, were becoming obsolete as people changed to digital formats. But what they found was quite different.
In 1999, 0.03 per cent of the world鈥檚 information was stored on paper, and this dropped to 0.01 per cent in 2002. But in the same period, the total amount of information grew so fast that the absolute quantity of information stored on paper still rose by more than 30 per cent.
Peter Lyman, one of the report鈥檚 authors, says this is due partly to people printing electronic documents rather than reading them on screen. According to Abigail Sellen, co-author of the book The Myth of the Paperless Office, it is unlikely that paper consumption has slowed down at all in the past 30 years.
