Fax Chronicle

  Yet another blog post about the death of the fax machine in someone else’s office.

Each time I walk past our fax I find pages sent to us by vacation cruise lines or mortgage brokers. It’s Junk Fax. It’s SPAM sent via fax. I’m sure most junk fax-ers don’t know that the CAN SPAM law of 2004 covered junk fax, also.

I’m just saying, how many faxes do you receive each day?
So I asked Ky, “Should we drop our fax number from our business cards? Seems to me if someone wants to send us a fax, then we’re already in a conversation with them. And if so, then it’s pretty easy to give them our fax number.”

In the end, we decided to keep the facsimile number on our cards. But its days are numbered. It’s going to go the way of the typewriter, keylines and the rotary dial telephone.

In a few years, your younger staffers will look at you quizzically when you mention the word “Fax.” It simply will no longer be relevant. Personally, I’m fine with that. These machines are headed toward boat anchor status.

My comment back was:

You make some good points, but in fact I think you may be a bit off in your “few years” prediction. The fax isn’t going anywhere for awhile. If someone had told me in 2001 that I would be working in the fax industry in 2007 or even 2003, I would have laughed them out of the room. It’s the same thing I thought in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2005, etc. I spent the last 2 years of my life working for an internet fax company building their brand and that market is booming. You may see fax machines go away (although unlikely) but until humans trust digital signatures, the fax is here to stay and so far after 13 years of digital signature being legal the only digital signature we use is for legal agreements on web sites.

You will use fax less, but you will still need it. I would say though, that you should get rid of your machine and move solely to Internet Fax. If you have a scanner, that is all you really need.

Source: Smoke & Meers: Faxing is so Twentieth Century