Google Docs runs out of ink

For my entire adult life, word processing and computers have been a staple of the American office job. The crazy thing is that machines that now seem ancient (like typewriters) weren’t fully phased out of work until the 1980s. When people wrote things, it mattered. You had a finite amount of ink to compose your thoughts, and making mistakes meant you needed to use white-out to fix them, or you’d have to start over.

Word processors undoubtedly made humanity more efficient, but it came at the cost of us being more careless. It’s okay to make spelling and grammatical mistakes because tools like spellcheck and Grammarly can help you fix any errors you make in just a few clicks (though I still make egregious errors occasionally).

This phenomenon, as well as a suggestion from my good friend Tregg made me wonder what it would look like to place an artificial constraint on the modern word processor. What if Google Docs ran out of ink and charged you for a refill?

Given the number of free alternative software solutions, people would most likely switch to another free tool. However, the holdouts would create more succinct documents and also adjust to have fewer errors when writing. Could be a good feature (minus the upsell) to learn the value of typing thoughtfully and accurately.

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