The Office of the Future

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But word processing has focused new attention on dictation because IBM and others feel it is a key to the WP center concept. Because of better new products and the emerging WP market, sales of dictation equipment will grow from $161 million in 1973 to $244 million in 1977, according to SRI.

Other techniques are being worked on to augment or supplant dictation equipment, but these developments seem to be well down the road. Optical character recognition (OCR) equipment, which can already automatically read typed text and convert it into machine-readable data, is getting better all the time. Some WP users already are considering it, but the main stumbling blocks are its high cost and the number of errors that OCR still makes.

Another part of future office systems is information storage and retrieval, which is now "very archaic and the most feeble" of all the office functions being handled independently, says Xerox' Goldman. "We don't know how this will shake out," he says, "but we do know that storage will be other than paper." The replacement for the filing cabinet could be magnetic or optical disks, and "don't rule out microfilm yet," he adds.

The soaring cost of paper has caused a surge of growth in the use of microforms (microfiche and microfilm), an older replacement for the filing cabinet. Bell & Howell Co.'s Richard L. Miller sees this market growing from today's $700 million to $2 billion by 1980 as companies begin using microforms for active business records as well as archival records.

But ADL's Giuliano is less sanguine: "In many ways microforms are inferior to paper. Special readers are required, images are poor, and they are hard to manipulate and can't be erased or annotated." He sees them as an interim solution.

Most WP equipment developed so far is designed to move information around faster inside the office. But the office also is gaining increasingly powerful links to the outside world via facsimile equipment. "After decades of high hopes and low performance, facsimile finally appears to have taken off in general business communications," International Resource Development, Inc., says in a recent study. And it estimates that Xerox accounts for 60% of the installed units and has 80% of current shipments. In the past two years, fax installations have more than doubled from fewer than 50,000 to more than 100,000 units.

Xerox expects to keep its momentum going with a new plain-paper Telecopier that combines a laser and xerography to send documents over ordinary phone lines at the rate of two minutes per page. "If you went to the top 100 companies, there would be a 50-50 chance that they'd have some sort of electronic mail—and that's just Xerox gear," says David Klein, Xerox' facsimile marketing head. "Some users have enough Telecopiers now—Washington law firms, for example—that they order one just like a phone."

Today's word-processing equipment exists largely as a conglomeration of stand-alone machines, each developed to do a specific task and not linked to other office equipment. Now the first links are just beginning to be made, merging the stand-alone units into embryonic office systems and leading on toward the office of the future.