Hard copies of things just have so many advantages that electronic copies will never, ever have. So because of that, I don't think the business world will completely get rid of hard copies. What are some of those advantages?
1) Attention. People overexaggerate the importance of things on electronic mediums. Suppose I had an urgent memo to send to my employees. I could email them the memo, which will be lost in their inbox with 100 other "urgent", "extremely important", "highest priority", etc junk mails. Look at the post at the top of this Off Topic forum: "DRUG ALERT" with a huge exclamation point by it (actually it had two exclamation points for a while when a moderator made it stick to the top of the forums). Too bad it is 2.5 year old information about drugs that aren't produced anymore. It is just human nature to exaggerate these electronic messages and nothing will fix human nature. But if I take that same memo and tape it to all of the employee's monitors/keyboards they will instantly see it, read it, and obey it. The fact that someone took the time to do it manually instantly gives it higher priority than any electronic medium will ever get.
2) Ease of use. Suppose I write a 30 page progress report. Of course my boss won't read it all, he just needs the important data. Suppose that is on pages 1, 11, 23, and 29. He can pull those out and spread them on his desk and instantly compare/contrast them. To do the same thing on electronic mediums requires either 4 monitors or non-stop scrolling (which gets very annoying and tedious). So far no technology lets you spread a computer screen out over your desk and shuffle the images around (and if it did exist it would cost a whole heck of a lot of money, much more than the 2 cents to print out a paper). It just is far too inconvenient to do many things electronically.
3) Speed. I do a lot of programming. You'd think working 8 hours a day at a computer, I'd be efficient at debugging on the computer. But no I'm not. It is far faster to print the code out, and get a highlighter to accent important pieces of code. Then I can glance over the code (I guess this overlaps point #2 if the code is more than one page), looking at the highlights, and make my changes there on the paper. Few programs give good methods to highlight on the computer - and it is frustrating and time consuming. Constant scrolling up/down just to see the code above is quite annoying (and I use a 22" monitor). It is just so much slower if you don't have a copy sitting on your desk to proof read.
4) Permanancy. I know I can make a copies of an important document and store one copy at home and one in my office. They will be immediately available forever (barring some enormous disaster that distroys the entire city). Put a file on a company computer and you'll never know if you can get it back again. The computer crashes, someone deletes the file, the file gets corrupted, the file type becomes out of date over the years and you can no longer find a program to open the file, etc (That is assuming of course you can still find the computer file from 9 years ago). I know anytime I do an important online transaction, I write down a hardcopy confirmation code. I just don't trust the electronics enough yet (since I've had them fail on me in the past). Sure with tons of work you can possibly keep good backups of the information on your companies computer systems - but what about dealings with other companies/customers. You have no control over thier computers, and how well they will maintain their files.
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