Ending the Paper Chase

There is plenty of clutter in the spacious office of William Gates. Overlooking a 260-acre campus dotted with magnificent fir trees, the room contains a forest of paper. His desk is completely covered by scattered piles of documents; next to it the matching beige credenza is buried under small mountains of loose letters, memos and newspaper clips. Even the floors are littered with the stuff. But if the co-founder and chief executive of computer-software powerhouse Microsoft has his way, this pulp potpourri will soon recede. "I don't want to get rid of all paper," says Gates in his Redmond, Washington, headquarters. "I just don't think we should proliferate it by passing it around."

This week America's richest and most famous computer nerd will unveil his latest venture: an office software system that could connect computers, phones, copiers, fax machines and printers into a seamless digital web, thus permitting them to exchange information and circulate documents electronically. The system -- based on Microsoft's wildly successful Windows software -- could lead to a new wave of advanced office machines that would, for example, allow someone to write a memo and instantly send it to the computer screens of his staff members, the photocopier down the hall, his boss's printer, and the fax machines and computers of his division managers around the world.

Microsoft is only a software maker, of course, and the linchpin of Gates' strategy is getting the manufacturers of these machines to modify them so they will run his new programs. Judging by the blue-chip companies that will be sharing the dais with him when he unveils his system this week at the Hotel Macklowe in midtown Manhattan -- Hewlett-Packard, Ricoh, Compaq Computer, Minolta, McCaw Cellular, Canon, NEC and Northern Telecom -- he seems to have made remarkable progress. Says Paul Saffo, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future: "This may not be it, but it is one more step toward the Holy Grail of the paperless office."

This is not the first time a successful high-tech company has tried to fully automate the contemporary office. Xerox tried during the 1960s and '70s using networks of word processors, printers, telephones and copiers. After losing a bundle, a humbled Xerox staged a full retreat back to paper and ink, and now calls itself "the Document Company." Another office-of-the-future hopeful, Wang Laboratories, recently placed a huge bet on expensive paper-scanning and imaging systems to stamp out paper. Customers balked, Wang abandoned the office-equipment business and filed for bankruptcy last year. IBM also tried and failed, as did oil giant Exxon, which ended up selling off its office- automation division in 1984 after investing more than $2 billion in it. Microsoft could be next, warns Richard Shaffer, editor of ComputerLetter. "Here's yet another company pursuing the elusive dream of the paperless office," he says. "It might also be in for a rude awakening."