When I worked in Silicon Valley almost 10 years ago, a co-worker, Tim (brilliant guy), scanned everything at home. Same reasoning as this article from the NY Times, Pushing Paper Out The Door, mentions - as an easier way to keep track of things. When I looked into it at the time, the speed of scanners was a big issue. Still is, but it seems to be getting better. I have noticed that for scanning images the speed is much better (I use a CanoScan 8600F), but there can be driver problems with some programs (PhotoShop). It's nice to read that OCR has improved dramatically as has the ability to use a paper feed on scanners. Last time I looked at scanners I did not see a low cost paper feed, especially one that can deal with different size papers. Using a desktop search tool as a way to find previously written information is great! The problem I have seen is these tools can result is a slower PC.
I see this eventually have a huge impact on the amount of paper used. The problem with a paperless office is paper is easy to use, faster to read than E-Mails, and easily transportable. It also has no boot time and is easily edited. If you have an image on a computer, to add text is a bit inconvenient. And doing searches on images is still a challenge, as well as categorizing them. A filing cabinet is an amazing piece of organizational hardware, that currently is still not as easy to replicate on the PC. It is getting closer which I look forward to.
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