W2C

"The fact that the paperless office hasn’t come to pass yet doesn't mean that it never will. After all, while desktop computers and clunky monitors still bear a family resemblance to the terminals and CRTs of a bygone era, technologies like smart dust, RFID, wireless, and flexible displays are completely different. Likewise, the vision of computing that drives pervasive computing research is nothing like today’s chunky interactions with keyboards and monitors. Should it come to pass, the model will deeply affect the way people will interact with information, and, in turn, the way information will interact with the world.

Most importantly, computers will be everywhere, and we will interact with them constantly, but hardly be aware of them. Think of what driving a car is like today. A luxury car can have a hundred microprocessors or more in it, monitoring and controlling everything from the ignition to the exhaust to the temperature of the seats. Yet the experience of driving a Mercedes C-Class or a BMW 700 series car (so I’m told – I’ve never been behind the wheel of either one) is nothing like checking your email or fiddling with a spreadsheet. An even better - or at least more financially accessible - model is the iPod. It’s a big hard drive, some software, and thousands of files. But from an interaction standpoint, it’s nothing like a computer.

In the office, this trend will translate into no longer having to choose between dealing with colleagues or computers. Today, most of us have to toggle our attention between people in the room or our computers; it’s very hard to keep both in our perceptual field. But smaller, less-obtrusive technologies could be the basis of devices that support face-to-face interaction, sociability, and creativity, rather than competing with them, or forcing them into narrow channels."

Link
Source: Red Herring

Remarks by Bill Gates
"BILL GATES: Well, the right adoption of computer technology will change the way resources are used. I was at a CEO event a few months ago and I was saying that even though the idea of the paperless office has been kind of ridiculed, I still believe in this idea of the paperless office, that is I believe that eventually you'll be reading off of the Tablet PC, whether it's your daily newspaper or your textbooks, that we won't be using paper for those things. And I'd forgotten there was a CEO from the paper industry in the audience, and so he spoke up and didn't like that, and then somebody from HP said, "Hey, but then we won't need printers, so that can't be right." (Laughter.) And I thought, hey, you just can't win.

So there are elements of this information technology society that are beneficial; that is, use of paper should go down quite a bit. We promote a new piece of software we have called Live Meeting literally for the fact that you don't need to travel as much. We're not saying you don't have to go face-to-face at all, but a lot of those trips are unnecessary as we bring in rich collaboration right there to the screen and there's a lot more software can do in terms of the different video viewing and how we record those things and make that easy to do.

So I think we can cut down on the amount of travel that's necessary. I also think computer technology, the intelligent computer technology really is pro-environmental. I mean, people are talking about now with gas engines that the way you can do injection in a different way, if you have enough computer control you can get almost double the efficiency out of even a gas engine, which is a great thing. So overall if you have more information the way you do irrigation is just more targeted and smarter, the way you use fertilizer is targeted and smarter."

Link
Source: Microsoft

See also:
Dude, where's my office? - Ross Mayfield's Weblog