I'm not entirely sure where I got these impressions from over the years, though I certainly used to use a lot of legal pads. I still really like stumbling across a nice one in the wild, even if I usually just get them from Amazon nowadays. (Aside: Is it just me, or are legal pads not as good these days as they used to be?)

Anyway, from this bit on Wikipedia about legal pads, it seems like that is one origin story for using "tablet" in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook#Legal_pad

Notably, from the last sentence of that story:

> ...he glued together a stack of halved sheets of paper, supported by a sheet of cardboard, creating what he called the "Silver City Writing Tablet".

It looks like it's marketed towards fitting in to the construction process. So I suppose it could monetize as just another construction contractor? But that would mean effectively just a set amount of money per "job," rather than any sort of truly recurring revenue.

Then they have 2 problems.

This question is one of a whole genre of "why" questions that come from supposed pragmatists, but I can't help but think the existence of the question misses the entire point.

Luckily, one of the older questions of this genre was about why anyone would bother to climb Mount Everest, and ol' Mallory had such a good answer that I'll just paste the whole thing here:

> People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron.

> If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.

Of course, with Venus, there's the joy of exploration and also tons of profits and learning to be had. For example, we could cover the entire planet in giant ads. Think of the CPMs you'd get as people looked out the window on their way to Mercury!

If you can convince people to put everything in "project rooms" (or "team rooms" or whatever) instead of DMs, then you effectively end up with the ability to search all the historical knowledge of the company.

> Has anyone solved this problem?

You're asking if anyone has solved the problem... of human nature? I don't think it's at the top of most people's lists of action items.

> Is anyone trying to solve this problem?

Your nearest meditation center, I suppose.

Perhaps, for efficiency, they could ask everyone simultaneously in parallel, or at least roughly around the same time?

To maximize creativity and opportunity, perhaps we could then figure out some way to share each person's status update with every other person on the team?

Technically, if all the bond-holders get together, they could spend up to $99M building an extremely powerful, extremely tiny fan pointed directly at the sensor.

Just to offer a counterpoint:

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

The more I experience, the more I think maybe that's a pretty good point, too.