The phone maker gets their profit from selling new phones. Updating your phones OS to a new version cost them money and delays your purchase of a new phone. How much effort would you put into raising your cost while costing yourself future revenue? The carrier makes money by locking you into a longer contract term. Often those new terms are at more $$ per month which happens when you buy a new phone. Updating your phone to a new version delays your commitment to a new contract term. I'm perfectly happy with my 3 year old android, especially since I updated it myself via an xda-developer ROM. But what if the manufacturer/carrier said "You want Gingerbread? Give us $20. You want Jelly Bean? Give us another $20. You want Key Lime? Give us another $20." They get cash in hand, you get renewed life on your phone.

Are you in?

Quote from Ernesto Sirolli, during his wonderful TED talk: Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!

There was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860. And in 1860, this group of people came together, and they all speculated about what would happen to the city of New York in 100 years, and the conclusion was unanimous: The city of New York would not exist in 100 years. Why? Because they looked at the curve and said, if the population keeps growing at this rate, to move the population of New York around, they would have needed six million horses, and the manure created by six million horses would be impossible to deal with. They were already drowning in manure.

So what happens? In 40 years time, in the year 1900, in the United States of America, there were 1,001 car manufacturing companies - 1,001. The idea of finding a different technology had absolutely taken over, and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters.

Reality Check: All of the companies who are promoting this stand to make money off of you if you go paperless. None of the companies promoting this make money off of you if you maintain a paper workflow. They don't care if its better for YOUR business, its better for THEIR business. I work for a company which sells document management solutions in the SMB space. We have also migrated many of our internal systems to the cloud. In my experience the problems are:

1. Electronic document storage is only as good as your last backup. Sure paper can get destroyed in a fire, but your server is probably not going to be much good either.
2. When your internet connection goes down you are paying everyone in the office to play Angry Birds on their phone.
3. The cloud based systems often require specific OS's and software versions for compatibility. God forbid you want to use an OS which does not support ActiveX, or a user updates their Java version.
4. At least for the HR system we use, it takes forever for performance reviews to get through the process because the provider has a website for crap, and we have no control over it.
5. The dirty little secret for electronic document storage is that offices often print MORE paper than before. Most people print out the document to work with it, so rather than having one hard copy in the file folder you now have 6 copies in the recycle bid because they were read once and discarded.
6. Ask your provider about the number of systems sold compared to the number of systems still actively used 24 months later. They sold you the system (and probably a yearly maintenance contract) but they DO NOT CARE if you use the system or not.
7. Trees are a renewable resource. The coal that powers your office, not so much. And when paper companies can't make money selling paper they just sell the land to shopping mall developers. Where is the good in that?

The one thing I never hear anyone discuss is the content. Sure the internet is great at distributing content. But where does the content COME FROM? The content of most internet "news sites" are links generated from someone who actually used a human to gather information and then write the story. Who was that actual human? Did MSN, Yahoo, Google or Drudge send out a human to talk to people, take pictures, research relevant facts? I'm guessing no to all of the above. They sucked up the content someone else paid to generate and put it on the net for free.

"When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem."

Sure the business model of the internet news feed can beat the Rocky Mountain News trying to sell content thrown on your front yard. But none of those "outlets" originate the news content, they regurgitate what someone else paid a reporter to generate. Freedom of the press means that you can print what you want and the government cannot stop you. It does not mean consumers are entitled to all of the news for free just because it exists. Before the net gave you access were you entitled to a free daily copy of the New York Times in your home, office, or coffee shop? Even when you live in Omaha? Just because MSN will give you an article for free does not make it free to generate. What happens to freedom of the press when the "printing press" is free? Will the news business degenerate into something that looks like tech review websites? Where they decide what to review and what to say about something based on who is giving them a free sample and who is paying the freight? Will you be able to trust your news site when what they publish is based on web clicks and flash ads? Whose feet do you hold to the fire when a blog post is repeated around the world and it turns out to be made up by a drunk in Waco who was bored on a Friday night? Will Google print an apology and a retraction?

Although there are similarities to the music business, at least there you have clubs, concert tours etc where a group of guys who want to make a living in the business can do so even if 90% of what they generate is pirated off the net for free. How many of you will go to a Ruben Navarrette, Charles Krauthammer or David Ignatius concert? They write columns for the Washington Post Writers Group, syndicated in almost 200 papers nationwide. You have probably read some of their stuff on your favorite news feed. How do real news reporters make a living when there is no one to pay for what they write? They quit the news business and turn it over to Perez Hilton.

Welcome to the Idiocracy

First, this technology has been in use since the very beginning of color laser devices, even before you could use them as a printer. Meaning this started when a color laser printer retailed for close to $100k. It was there (along with other technology) to mark everything that came out of the machine. On the Canon CLC line there is a bar code imbedded on a plate next to the copier glass. Every time you hit the start button, it reads the bar code and compares it to the value stored on the controller board to make sure you had not monkeyed with it, then it prints that bar code all over the page with single yellow pixels. How did they track it? Easy, the thing cost over $75,000. Every one that left the factory was tracked by the manufacturer. They knew where every serial number went. The feds would call up those manufacturers a few times a year asking who a machine with such and such a serial number was sold to. Fast forward to todays commercial equipment and that same thing still applies. I can't vouch for whether you can run down to Best Buy and walk out with a color laser without Best Buy recording the serial number and tying it to your name, but it will dang sure still print identifying info on every page that comes out. It would not suprise me if most of the stuff you drag home marks its territory too, including ink jets. Even if the authorities can't look you up in a database and knock on your door, if they happen to raid your place and grab your printer, try to make new friends in prison.