I had a great conversation last night with my friend Mark. Among many other things we talked about, we came around to the topic of the paperless office. For about a decade now, we’ve heard that we are at the dawn of the paperless office. Documents can be virtualized, then organized and re-organized on a whim. Data in XML format can be ported and shared between people and applications with very little loss due to “friction” in process. We are no longer beholden to the costs of filing and storing physical paper pages.

So, why do we still use paper?

I think there are two main reasons:

• Paper is cheap.
• Paper is simple to use, and as a technology, provides additional functionality over what current computer displays can provide.

Since I know very little about the economics of paper production, I can’t really address the first point, other than to say if paper suddenly jumped in price the way gasoline has, I doubt you’d see nearly as many people in the office sending those 200 page reports over to the LaserJet.

The second point however is firmly in techno-weenie land (my happy home). What kind of digital technology can compete with paper for functionality and ease-of-use?

Readability
Face it, computer screens are hard to read. If you look at them too long you go cross-eyed. Innovations like the Amazon Kindle make me hopeful that in the near future, all monitors will be similarly optimized for document readability.

Organizing, highlighting and notetaking
The one thing you definitely learn after you’ve shuffled papers around your desk for any length of time is that paper is easy to shuffle around. If you want to combine a spreadsheet and a document into one report, all you need is a stapler. Marking up printed documents is simple and quick.

Touch screen interfaces seem to be the best prospect for easy manipulation of digital documents. Personally, I think the best current implementation is Apple’s iPhone. Microsoft also has an exciting offering in this space, called Surface. Rather than being a touchscreen you can fit in your pocket like the iPhone, with Surface, the interface is a multi-touch tabletop. The demo shows applications in the home, restaurants, bars, etc.

Imagine a different application where your physical desktop is replaced with a Surface interface instead. You can do your regular computing with your standard keyboard/mouse/monitor. Then, we you need to, you just drag your document over to your Surface desktop, where you can use the touch interface to flip through documents, shuffle pages, blend documents together, insert photos, markup documents with a pen or stylus … whatever you want to do, all with the same relative ease of manipulating paper documents. The best of both worlds.

The biggest downside to this is that currently Surface is not available to consumers. Also, it’s very expensive, the main current target market being hotels, resorts, casinos, trendy high-end bars, etc. Also, let’s face it, as this hysterical Surface parody from SarcasticGamer points out, Surface is a big-ass table. There is a long way to go before this could be integrated into the workplace.

Power Consumption
You don’t have to plug paper in. Not sure what we can do about that one.

I believe the paperless office can actually become a reality, but we’re not really there yet. Why do I care so much about it? Because even though I’ve never hugged one, trees are nice. They provide shade, they make the air smell nice, they use up carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, and it sounds cool when wind blows through their leaves. We should cut fewer of them down.

On ZDNet today, Jason Perlow wrote a fun blog post 2016: “You’re watching the Linux Channel.”. Instead of the usual opinion piece, he instead tells us a day-in-the-life story of an average Joe (Josef Konsumer), who works in New Jersey for a global bank conglomerate HQ’ed in Bangalore. It’s an interesting snapshot of Jason’s vision of a world of Linux-based cloud computing, ubiquitous broadband connectivity, and smart household devices.

Without getting too deep into the specifics of his ideas (essentially subscription based access to Linux via semi-dumb terminals) or the literary merit of the piece (a little thin on plot, but this is what Orson Scott Card would call a “milieu story” — lol), Mr. Perlow supplies us with something I find lacking in general discussions about Linux – a clear singular vision of what Linux can be.

My main problem with the Linux community is the feeling that the FOSS nature of Linux means it can be literally all things to all people. The OS can be anything, so therefore it can be everything. Whether the future of Linux is going where Jason wants it to go remains to be seen. However, for it to go anywhere, someone is going to have to step up with a clear vision of a niche where Linux can be the best solution. Despite major leaps forward in that past decade in terms of simplicity, ease of installation, look and feel, and number of available applications, Linux still can’t shake the “me too” stigma.

Linux has a nice GUI, too. Linux has an Office suite, too.

What I want to know is, what is Linux the leader in. What can Linux be that no other OS can be?

The answer, I suspect, will not be a technological one, but rather an entrepreneurial one. Some bright, tech-savvy, business-minded person (or group of people) will see a need and will leverage Linux to bring this solution to market. Rather than build something from scratch, they will instead leverage what Linux already can do. The future, I believe, will not be in innovations to Linux itself, but rather to applications of Linux. Perhaps it will include major proprietary components, along the lines of Apple leveraging BSD for use in OS X. Perhaps it will be fully open source.

Regardless, it is going to require a visionary leader to stand out in front of the community and lead the charge. And thanks, Jason, for showing us a glimpse of where that leader might take us.