The Rise of Paper

A friend of mine relayed some interesting news from Franklin/Covey today. They are selling more paper planners than they have in years, while their PDA sales have dropped to a trickle.

I think I know the reason for this. And no, before I even get started, PDAs are not dead. The handheld computer is every bit as useful as ever, probably moreso as they get more powerful. The reason so many are going back to paper is psychological, not technical.

Think about a typical Franklin planner. It's big, heavy, bound in sturdy leather. The paper is, well, paper. It'll last for decades with no care or maintenance. And even though readers of this column know that if you lose a paper planner, you're screwed, where if you lose a PDA, all your data is backed up on your PC, most people don't see it that way. In 2004 America, we're in a war that seems endless, caught in a recession with less buying power than we had last year, and a lot of us are scared. A solid, leather-bound planner has a sense of permanence that they don't get from computers.

I also think most buyers don't realize what handhelds can really do. I recently taught a series of classes for a Fortune 500 company on PDA basics. We gave them brand new Zire 31s and spent a few hours putting them through their paces. In each one of the classes, less than 10% of the class knew Palms could be used for word processing, spreadsheets, email, or audiobooks. The point I drove home at the start of each class was that these were no "digital daytimers" and that to get the best use out of them, the students should think of them as what they were: truly personal computers. A $150 Zire 31 has more computing power than a first generation Pentium, and I made sure they knew it.

So how can the handheld industry turn around this retrenching? By putting more advertising muscle behind what no one thinks of using a PDA to do, things simply not possible with paper planners.