Why Fax Won’t Die
Summary
Like many businesses in older industries, from law firms to medical labs, fax machines aren’t seen as some ‘80s anachronism but as an efficient, reliable, and mostly secure way to communicate—the same way their own customers see their laptops and smartphones. That is, Phaxio lets its customers build faxing into their apps and websites with the same kind of APIs they’d use to integrate 21st-century services like posting tweets or sending email confirmations, without needing to think about the phone lines and screeching modems that make it all happen. Faxage measures and bills usage in minutes to make price comparisons with traditional phone plans simpler, says EC Data Systems’ president Christian Watts. Relying on external services and software to abstract away the quirks of an underlying technology certainly isn’t unique to fax: Developers routinely use libraries like jQuery to handle the details of browser intercompatibility or tools like PhoneGap to build cross-platform mobile applications. Skeptics have argued for years that fax has already long overstayed its welcome—that its continued prevalence is just the result of typical enterprise conservatism and older generations’ enthusiasm for the printed word and signatures inked on the proverbial dotted line.
