"Repeat: the world still does not understand the Internet"

Jim,

Good stuff as usual and also as usual I generally agree with your hypothesis.

To illustrate, while reading your column, sitting in my home office, working for a company whose HQ is over 5000 miles away, a UPS truck pulled up outside and delivered a mattress, ordered online, and a book from TAPPI, ordered online.

For a 65 year old, that series of occurrences is real and beneficial progress. To a youthful member of today's generation, business as usual, not worthy of a passing thought..

As to 'current rate of change', whenever presenting to a group of typical paper mill management I like to make that very point. Two scenarios both reflecting back at my youth provide the vision. First, talking about the town I grew up in that, at the time, using horse drawn plows to clear the streets and sidewalks of snow and then jumping forward to my first ever job in a paper mill, right out of college, where I was assigned maintenance responsibility for a single point scanner from EAS, serial number 6, in which vacuum tubes were the primary technology. After relishing the incredulous looks these glimpses of life extract, I suggest that the rate of change (and adaptation to those changes) during my life is nothing compared to what will occur in their lifetime.

Other changes that have occurred are the cost of electronic memory, phone communications and information search capability. Space for offices in the old days was necessary in order to 'store' the resources for knowledge and information, e.g., file cabinets, bookcases, desk drawers, etc.

When we moved from the Atlanta area 9 years ago, giving up a 3000 sq ft house w/ a three stall garage and a full basement, to move into a 1400 sq ft house and two garage stalls something had to go. Over 2000 books went to the local Cherokee county library, for which they were very grateful. Several (I think 7) 4 drawer steel cabinet files full of of 'priceless' hard copied information went to the recycle center. Since the move, the laser printers have been replaced with a $39 (after rebate) 'all-in-one' Costco special, the big, bulky monitor has been replaced with a sleak, space saving LCD and the desktop is now a laptop with no functional loss and my phone slips into my pocket wherever I go. The ever onward advance of technology allows for a lot less space for offices..

John Yolton
Eureka, California
USA

ps: I chuckled because at first I had to reread a part of your story, the part that said you and your wife "...have been out house shopping recently" before realizing the two words were separated and had an entirely different meaning than my brain first interpreted.

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John, you bring up some interesting rate of change recollections. My Grandmother Thompson was born just after the invention of the telephone and died after man had landed on the moon. Her son, my dad, had his first real job in a blacksmith shop and finished his career making prototype Star Wars toys for Kenner (now part of Mattel). I suspect most readers are too young to even get the line you found so funny (as expressed in your p.s.). The reason I went to college, I always say, was to have heating, air conditioning and indoor plumbing, all things missing from my youth.

Jim

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Enjoyed it, as usual. I agree with some of your predictions but suggest alternative for others.

Unfortunately, I think that most of your predictions on the Internet and computers killing half the pulp and paper industry are accurate. I used to be laughed at too, when I said that computer technology would largely replace communications papers. The paperless office will not come in the foreseeable future, but the less-paper office has arrived, and is prospering.

However, I had not (until you suggested it) thought about the declining need for transport due to Internet and related technology. I have been doing it for 20 years or so, living in a summer cottage area when my competitors maintained downtown offices and commuted from the suburbs. I am presently on a skiing holiday in Banff, but doing some work too. The clients have no idea where I am.

My 3rd largest consulting assignment in 30 years was completed, without any paper, in a remote anchorage in the Bahamas. There were no stores ashore, but WiFi Internet cost $10/week. I read about 1000 pages of reports (PDF by Email and Internet) and wrote a 30 page opinion on the Fray Bentos mill for the World Bank, along with a biologist from Vancouver who I had never met.

I think that you are correct in saying the Manhattan and the other expensive office hubs will become obsolete. However, as workers spread over the countryside on Internet connections, they will want plenty cars. We need two cars in our country location, whereas downtown residents are happy with none or one. However, they will drive a lot less making cars last longer and burning less gas. Ethanol and diesel from wood will go nowhere.

We all know what a mess the newspapers and newsprint are in. I was talking with a senior Time Inc staffer last week, who predicts the demise of many magazines this year. I reckon that newsprint and magazine paper demand will drop by at least 10% per year till it is down to about 10% of the 2000 levels

I think that packaging will do OK for many years, and disposable papers such as tissue, sanitary products for hospitals etc, will boom as the standard of living rises in China and India, and many other countries. Canada and the States will see new (Chinese owned ??) pulp mills built starting in 10 years or so to supply the fiber, unless perhaps Russia gets its political house in order and organizes its economy.

Keep up the good writing.

I hope you are getting enough money out of it. I am glad that I am about 2/3 retired, doing only work that comes looking for me. Being right in predicting the demise of communications papers ahs not earned me any money.

Neil McCubbin
Foster, Quebec
Canada

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Thanks, Neil. We do all right. Of course, if our readers (that means you, anyone who is reading this) would tell their suppliers they read us and suggest to them that they just might want to advertise in the publications their customers read and love, Nip Impressions, PaperMoney and Capital Arguments, it would help a great deal!

Jim

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Hi Jim,

Great article! I completely agree that the internet is the vehicle for future business, not just socialization....

Best Regards,

Phil Grasso
USA

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I forwarded your brilliant article to my peer group here at Albany International. I am on Mike Joyce's senior staff--Mike has responsibility of all of North and South America (paper machine clothing) and our global Engineering Fabrics business as well. As we contemplate a smaller headquarters, I've been one of the managers to say "don't allot a lot of space for my group" we are just fine working from home, meeting a couple times live per month, and connecting as we now do with all the technology that requires less and less face to face time.

One thing it will expose in the future. The manager that is the control freak--the one who has to check up on everyone--that cares more about how long you work rather than what you accomplish--for that cadre of people your comments don't compute. A business less structured, including the physical offices, are not for this type of manager.

For those (hopefully I am thought of in this vein) that consider what value you bring to customers and the company count most, and less about how you look doing it, well, your article was a laser beam of truth.

Keep writing these.

We read them.

And even act on em too.

Regards,

Bill Luciano

VP Drying Americas
Albany International
Albany, New York
USA

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Hello Jim

First the diatribe:

What a bleak picture of the future world you paint. I suspect it is your US perspective that lends your review its distinctly paranoid undertones (message: actual contact with actual people is undesirable, distasteful, hardly 21st century, probably very dangerous and so is to be avoided at any cost. Ergo anything which enables us not to have it is a Good Thing). But no matter whence it came, you have offered that view and I’d like respectfully to suggest "it ain’t all grand."

Leaving aside the issue of whether you are right or not about the looming takeover of our lives by the expanded virtual office concept and the triumph of facebook-as-community, I wonder if we should think about whether this is the existence we actually want for our kids? I think we both accept more or less that the present norms of western consumerism - and in particular our car-centred urban, suburban and societal means of organising ourselves - will not continue for much longer, partly because of technological obsolescence (your thesis) and partly due to exhaustion of resources (the doomsday thesis). However, rather than your "more of the same only more so" future I prefer the vision of small strongly personal communities linked by less resource hungry means. So for me the future should not be about passively accepting an organisational or civilisational structure foisted upon us by "efficiency" or the vestigial powers of self preservation retained by the large corporations and governments, but rather it should be about controlling the development of our future urban and suburban spaces so that the role of the internet you describe does not feature.

We must reject the laissez faire and fatalistic approach to external quasi-mystical forces (includes technology) that we inherited from the discredited nouveau capitalists of the late 20th century, and take steps to manage and limit the application of the internet and that other "tool" of mankind that has done so much to master us, the car (see PS). The isolationist existence of the early 21st century middle classes seems to me to be the antithesis of a desirable human condition. See it all around you - one parent and 1.5 kids rattling around in a huge detached dwelling in an endless suburban desert, fear of perfectly ordinary inter-human interaction on the basis of "danger", unreasonable pre-occupation with health and the fear of aging, perception of TV and film as reality, hitherto unimaginable social behaviour such as school shootings, and so-on ad nauseum. We have unheard-of prosperity and material wellbeing, but the lifestyle price we have paid is too high. Your proposal not only propagates this flaw to whatever areas of our lives remain thus far still interlinked with others, but perfects it into a very vision of hell.

Now here's the encouragement:

Keep up the good work. And keep helping us understand the future for our industry is not try to replicate the past.

Thanks again for a most worthwhile weekly ideas jogger.

Regards

John Reid
Carter Holt Harvey
Kinleith, Tokoroa
New Zealand

PS: Whenever I visit your fair country, and in particular the cities and "free" ways of the west coast, I always conclude what an alien from Mars would see at once: the dominant life forms in the US are the car and the motor lorry. Humans are evidently tolerated only to service them and await their pleasure. But that’s another rant for another day.

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John:

You have mistaken me for a proponent of what I wrote. What I wrote last week was purely from a developing technology/economic forces viewpoint. Although I like modern technology, the Amish way of life has much to recommend it. Also don't mistake California as representative of the rest of the US (sorry, John Yolton and Jim Craven).

But more to my point, I was talking with an executive director of a pulp and paper foundation at a major university just this week. He told me they are planning to hold an upcoming meeting, traditionally in a conference setting, on the Internet because the attendee population is largely on travel restrictions. The economic times are dictating this and once done, it will be very hard to go back.

Jim


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