Lack of Excellent Display Technology Means There's Still no Paperless Office

CIO — When Johannes Gutenberg thought up the printing press in 1450, he had only one application in mind: automating the manufacture of indulgences, the get-out-of-damnation cards then sold to anxious sinners by the church. As it turned out, the indulgence business had a scaling problem?mass production turned what had been a tolerated irregularity into the perception of complete corruption. The cultural reaction wrecked not only the market but very nearly the church itself. However, his printing system sidestepped this unpleasantness, spreading within a matter of decades to every corner of civilization. By the 19th century the printing press became an essential arm of commerce, responsible for everything from forms to catalogs to money.

In the Oct. 1, 1992, issue we ran an article covering the implications of the most recent twist in our relationship with print. More and more enterprises were starting to think of information technology as organized around decentralized groups of PCs. It seemed only natural to manage printing the same way, which meant moving the function out of central, often remote, departments and into workgroups. The growing number of multifunctional devices (which could print, copy and scan) on the market reinforced the idea by making it possible, at least in theory, to move copying out of copy centers and onto the edges of the enterprise as well. If computing was moving closer to users, didn’t it make sense for printing and copying to follow?

That’s how it seemed to us and to the many vendors whose products we examined in our piece. The actual realization of this vision has been strikingly slow. According to Bruce Dahlgren of printer manufacturer Lexmark, the large, central printing center remained a standard until very recently. There are numerous reasons why that might have happened. Centralization brought economies of scale and the convenience of single points of management. Software that supported network-based printing proved hard to write. Moving printing and copying to the edge of corporate networks sometimes required tinkering with the backbone of the organization (for example, moving copying from the facilities department to IT), and those changes are always slow.

However, the same arguments had been trotted out during the transition to microcomputer-based networks, and that movement took off like a prairie fire. A more subtle possibility for lingering print centralization is that in the early to mid-’90s everyone knew in their bones that networked PCs were the future, whereas most managers’ bones fell silent when they were asked about printing. Even if you didn’t believe in a paperless office, the role of printing in the 21st century enterprise was very cloudy. Given that murkiness, it just made sense to keep pushing decisions about the technology to the bottom of the pile.

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