Joel Orr, PhD, Chief Visionary, Cyon Research Corp., Bethesda, Md.

Can’t you just fax it to me?

Essential communications in engineering often are broken because of mismatches of various kinds. CAD system formats don't match, the occasional Mac shows up in a world of PCs, someone sends a Word 2007 file to someone who uses Word 2003. It's natural that everyone uses what they own. It is considered unnecessary to change software just for the sake of change.