

Google, HelloFax, Expensify And Others Want You To Go Paperless In 2013 - guiseppecalzone
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/google-expensify-paperless-2013/

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cmbaus
As someone who has spent most of his career in report creation and management
(specifically in financial asset management), I find the current state of
enterprise reporting in flux. In finance, most documents are still laid out
for print (PDFs, Word Docs, and even PowerPoints), but users are printing them
less frequently and viewing them either online or on their tablets, and IMO
the user experience leaves a lot to be desired.

At the same time, there is so much tooling and infrastructure out there for
print, that change is slow. There is a whole layer of increasingly senior
managers from my generation who grew up with Microsoft Office, and are slow
moving toward new reporting technologies. As a technologist this can be
frustrating (see: <http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic>), but change is
inevitable.

~~~
supercanuck
Tell me about it. I run into this a lot. Companies spend these vast fortunes
on ERP and Data warehouses only to have the final output be PDF Crystal Report
documents or 500,000 line item exports into Excel.

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cmbaus
As a technologist I sometimes forget that for many office workers their tool
kit is Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. They can't imagine a world where
they don't spend most of their time using those applications. At times I see
what people do with Microsoft Office, and I'm dumbfounded by the inefficiency.

I think the consumer part of this technology cycle is pretty well played out,
but there is still a lot to be done for businesses. I'm calling for the death
of what I call the "PC operator," which many office workers are. I think the
valley is going to catch on to this in the next year.

~~~
memset
I used to (vehemently!) agree with this sentiment!

Then, for a startup I worked for, I said "Enough is enough. I'm going to
automate this report for you and it will be so much better!" I was automating
a 12-step Excel-macro-vlookup-pivot-table report. I was using python.

And boy was it a pain. Have you ever tried implementing pivot-table
functionality in python? Holy smokes. (You can use numpy, but seriously don't
add that as a production dependency if you can help it. There is some pivot
table library but it doesn't actually do all the things real pivot tables do.)

First you filter on column A, then sort by column B, then vlookup, then pivot,
then... oof. Shoot me now.

And don't get me started on matplotlib. It is theoretically great, but doesn't
work on OSX, which is what I was using as my dev machine. What a cluster.

My point being that, in my limited experience, I really couldn't imagine a
world where devs had to write tools to do things that Excel has been doing for
decades! And without any intervention from the dev team too!

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memset
I keep trying to get my dad to get rid of his landline. But he won't, because
he sends faxes.

"Here," I said, "try this." I showed him HelloFax. That was a no-go, citing
privacy concerns. How can he be sure they aren't stealing or saving his
personal information? Even if their ToS says so, there's no way to know. And
most faxes are for things like insurance, which have SSN's, etc.

"But you realize," I said, "that every fax you send nowadays is going to
someone's email. Nobody is receiving physical faxes anymore." Sure, he said,
but then he is no longer the one responsible.

He's savvy enough to read the news and read about awful terms of service
changes, privacy breaches, and startups and services going out of business.

Plus, he reasons, what if you lose internet?

There's no substitute for a physical paper record. (What if the house burns
down? Well, he has a scanned copy on his computer too. We could go on
forever.)

And even if there was a substitute for a physical paper record, it is hard to
give peace of mind to my old man about whether hard or soft copies are
admissible in court. When _are_ soft copies admissible in court anyway?

So unless some service (somehow) is able to give privacy peace of mind to my
dad and address all of his issues... it is unlikely I would be able to
convince him to move into this century with respect to his personal
information, documents, and finances. What startup is solving that?

~~~
boas
Many (most?) hospitals still use fax machines to get medical records from
outside hospitals. There's not really a good alternative yet. Radiology
studies are still mostly sent on CD or DVD. We're actually working on solving
a small part of this problem -- see claripacs.com. Due to FDA and liability
issues, we're going after the research and education market before tackling
the clinical market.

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mseebach
This was discussed yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993463>

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milesf
I've been hearing about the "paperless office" since the mid-80's. What is
needed is not something to replace paper, but something better. For example,
the paper memo was replaced by email.

Paper is just another technology, and a very good one at that.

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jpswade
I went paperless back in 2011[1], never looked back since.

[1] <http://www.devotedit.com/2011/11/09/paperless-office/>

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rednukleus
I've tried paperless. I hated it. Having printouts that you can write on and
highlight and put tags on can make work so much easier in a lot of cases.

~~~
mkilling
This is also a problem with e-books: There's no way to just scribble something
on the pages. I hope there will be a solution for this soon.

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dangoldin
I wonder if these companies are themselves paperless? While I admire the
movement too much business still happens on paper.

In our case, we can't go entirely paperless due to the government and lawyers.
There are too many things we need to send snail-mail but here's hoping that
changes.

~~~
joelandren
Can't speak for the other members, but HelloFax has been completely paperless
since inception.

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dexter313
I hope in the future every person will have a personal A4 sized device capable
of displaying text and pictures of every format from any source.

~~~
esrauch
I hope we just have everything in digital non-fixed size formats so we can
display them easily on a device of any size.

~~~
jfoutz
Yeah, but what about stuff where the format really matters? Most people want
numbers on receipts to line up vertically. There exist spreadsheet looking
reports that are just big tables of numbers. There are, perhaps, ways of
presenting that data in a more fluid layout friendly way, but that's not an
easy thing to do.

