IF DISRUPTIVE technologies are interesting, then so must be their opposites. These would be technologies that repel change, stand against the waves of innovation and remain unaffected. Borrowing a term from ecology, we might think of these as climax technologies -- things such as lead-acid batteries, the internal combustion engine and, in the IS domain, faxing.

Faxing is very old -- it was originally developed for the telegraph -- but by the 1990s it was clear to almost everybody in IT that the technology was on its way out. The economic advantages of e-mail are just too compelling. After several frustrating years of watching the total number of fax transmission minutes climb steadily anyway, the expert consensus retreated to the prediction that at least desktop faxing (through fax modems) was bound to replace machine faxing.

Our own contribution, which was published on Sept. 1, 1992, was an analysis (and endorsement) of the economics of desktop faxing. It went like this: Machines force the employee to print the document, go get it, carry it to the fax machine and feed the pages by hand. Desktop faxing replaces all this (in theory) with a single mouse click. Multiplying reasonable estimates of the amount of time involved for each old-way task by average employee salaries (plus paper and toner costs) yielded electrifying returns on investment. In short, we inferred, fax machines were going to be obsolete. What could have been more obvious?

Yet the number of fax machines kept growing. Desktop faxing became so stagnant that some modem manufacturers shipped their products with the feature turned off, according to Peter David-son, a Burbank, Calif., consultant affiliated with IDC (a sister company to CIO's publisher, CXO Media).

Faced with the fact that the popularity of faxing refused to flag, conventional wisdom fell back once again, this time to the claim that if fax modems would not replace dedicated machines, then fax servers would. A few years later that case was bolstered by the arrival of Internet faxing, in which faxes travel over the Internet, from server to server (or better, port to port), instead of phone number to phone number.

In both cases the arguments seemed irresistible. Because fax servers run 24/7, they can send and receive at the cheapest phone rates, which add up, especially for companies doing any sort of broadcast faxing. Internet faxing goes even further, replacing toll charges with free connections, which is about as attractive as propositions get.

Yet year after year, machine fax sales continued to climb while the installation rates of fax servers and Internet faxing services (the former, admittedly, after a strong initial spurt) have stagnated. (Davidson says that even today 80 percent to 90 percent of faxes continue to be sent or received by stand-alone machines.) We won't even bring up the sorry fate of the idea that digital signatures would replace the need to fax hand-signed pages, or the failure of fax upgrade schemes such as color faxing and better compression algorithms. It's just all too embarrassing.

There are several theories as to what happened. The cost of switched connection calls, the technology competing with Internet faxing, has fallen drastically. Despite all the man-hours invested in attachment standards, computer software has never found a simple way to preserve and transmit complex formats, such as forms. Scanners and optical character recognition have never gotten smart and simple enough for a seamless takeover. Fax documents are hard to edit, which means that faxing is a quick-and-dirty authenticator -- the contract faxed over for a signature will probably be the same contract that is faxed back. Documents prepared on the desktop are just one degree more problematic.

Until recently it was hard even to figure out a simple way for a desktop to receive faxes. Say a digital fax comes in over the company Centrex; how does it get routed to a desktop? Does it pop up on the receptionist's computer so that he can check it against the company directory? Unlikely. The problem has been addressed fairly recently. A number of third-party companies, such as J2 Global Communications in Hollywood, Calif., issue fax numbers tied to specific e-mail addresses. Faxes sent to the number end up in the client's e-mail box.

Ultimately what makes faxes a climax technology is their degree of integration into the minutiae of everyday life. They just naturally incorporate themselves into our everyday habits. How many people print out text, mark it up by hand and then fax their annotated copy on to the next person in the chain of review? When a technology puts down its roots in niches of behavior as intimate and informal as these, it becomes as hard to replace as the pencil.

» posted by ITworld staff

CIO

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