I haven’t used a printer from more than three years. Part of that is because I’ve been conducting an experiment to see if I can ‘live in the cloud,’ part of it is because almost everything I do is digital in nature. The only time I really need to print something is when an organization insists on a faxed copy of a document and even that’s becoming quite rare. On those occasions, I drive 20 miles to the nearest place I know where there is a fax machine and make a day of it. It’s not efficient and hardly good use of increasingly scarce hydro-carbons but a good reminder that not everyone has jumped into the digital age.

Even so, I took a sharp intake of breath when I saw a post from my old chum Vinnie Mirchandani, setting out ways by which companies could mitigate their use of ink cartidges. At an alleged $8,000 a gallon, that’s a heck of a price to pay for the pleasure of holding a piece of paper. And that’s before we consider the costs asssociated with manufacturing the catridges and the toxins they produce.

I remember many years ago, Bill Gates saying that Microsoft would become paperless and yet today by all accounts, it uses more paper than ever. In my case it was a conscious decision to ‘just say no.’  With more applications going online into the SaaS world, I don’t see the justification for keeping paper copies of everything we do. Perhaps now is the time for business to dust off those old document management strategy papers and re-evaluate the need for printers, the paper and ink they consume.