Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Paper may be good for a lot of things... wiping your behind, for instance... but when it comes to communicating information, ink on paper is the last millennium's technology, as relevant to the future as the pony express.
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That's what they said when computers first started becoming so popular. The grand visions of "the paperless office". Nowadays we consume more paper than ever before. Computers make it that much easier to print out a couple extra copies (instead of carbons), that much easier to print up the current revision, correct it by hand, then enter the edits.
For wholesale adoption within a corporate environment, the device will have to have: physically thin, lightweight, an A4/Letter sized color screen, touch sensitive (preferably stylus or pen), and wireless mesh; software will have to be easy enough for middle management to use it, must support full Microsoft Office at minimum, and be able to handle collaborative whiteboarding in realtime over the wireless interface. We are still a long way from this point.
[Scenario: Conference room (doesn't have to be, but no manager would miss the change at interrupting productivity): I "hand out" the slides to everyone's tablets, as I switch from one to the next, everyone else's switches, as I annotate or edit, notes and changes show up on everyone else's, everyone else can annotate, either private or public (dependent on "corporate rank")]