People might do nothing but fire off e-mails all day long, but when it comes down to resumes, resignation letters, and urgent press releases, they look elsewhere. It would have all the attributes people love in e-mail, such as speed and low cost, but documents would arrive in an original, tangible, printed form. It is only a matter of time, she says, before time-sensitive memos emerge clean, crisp, and timely from our personal printers instead of blurred or crinkly from the fax machine. It isn't just the fax machine that's going to be ousted by the printer. The copy machine too may soon become an endangered species.
Copying is still how people think.
It has a simple user interface, and people think they're saving money when they copy rather than print multiple copies of a document. In a 1996 in-house audit, HP found that most office workers thought copying was cheaper than printing multiple originals. The company then calculated the cost of hardware, service, supplies, and electricity and discovered it cost Hewlett-Packard 2 cents a page to print and 6 cents to copy. Ticknor promptly started developing a line of HP printers to make multiple original prints. With one keystroke, you can send a document to the mopier, which will produce 20 copies and collate and staple them.