When you consider the fact that Lexmark is a printer company — and not even an especially large one by comparison to others in the business — you might intuitively conclude that it’s a company on the defensive.

“People don’t print anymore,” goes the refrain of conventional wisdom, “not even at the office.” It’s easier and more efficient now, when you need to refer to a digital document and have it close at hand, to send it to a tablet like an iPad, or even to a smartphone.

And yet, Lexmark is anything but on the defensive. It has been expanding in recent years, primarily by acquisition. In October, it spent $50 million to acquire Pallas Athena, a Dutch software firm specializing in managing and automating business processes — the flow of information through a company. Lexmark combined Pallas Athena with its previous acquisition, Perceptive Software, for which it paid $280 million in 2010; Kansas-based Perceptive specializes in managing unstructured data. Lexmark CEO Paul Rooke says that the two companies combined give Lexmark a position that is unique among companies in the printer business: The ability to help a customer manage and access information in whatever format makes the most sense.

While Lexmark is significantly smaller by revenue than its biggest rival — Hewlett-Packard’s printing division booked $26 billion in fiscal 2011, while Lexmark is on track to report about $4.2 billion in revenue, according to the consensus view of analysts — it is still able to win business away from its larger rivals, and keep those customers. I asked Rooke about this in a recent conversation:

AllThingsD: Paul, the conventional wisdom has held for a long time that printing was a dying business, and that paper was going to go away because everything would be digital. I think that’s been the general criticism of Lexmark since it first spun out of IBM 20 years ago. What do you think of that?

Paul Rooke: We’ve always seen ourselves not so much as a hardware company. When we started, back in 1991, we were evolving from printers to multifunction printers to fleet management. You can see that in our actions. We also want customers for life. We create industry-specific solutions in a responsible way. It’s not just the blocking and tackling of managing a company’s fleet of printers, but it’s about getting intimate with their business processes and managing the paper and ink and so on. And as we’ve evolved, we’ve become more of a solutions company. We like to say “print less, save more.” When we say that, we’re all about helping with smart devices and managing that fleet. But it also refers to capturing, managing and accessing content within the context of a business process.

Well, let’s talk about that a little. When you say “capturing and managing content and information,” what does that mean?

As we found ourselves managing these multifunction devices that have scanners built into them, we found ourselves capturing content off of paper and into digital infrastructure, and we’re looking to do more of that than we have been. You’ll see us do more interpretation of content and automatically routing documents according to what’s on them. But it doesn’t stop there. We found ourselves scanning documents and putting them somewhere and managing them. Our acquisition of Perceptive Software last year has really strengthened that as a value-add for us. A lot of the content that comes in is this messy unstructured content, and with Perceptive, we’re able to help customers manage this unstructured content and finally access it in the context of their business process. And that’s where our Pallas Athena acquisition comes in. When you put it all together, it puts us in a unique position in the industry. We’re not just a printer maker, but we link into the business processes and provide added value for our customers.

“Unstructured data” is a phrase I hear a lot. What does it mean, specifically, to Lexmark?

It’s anything that doesn’t fit in massive databases that are arranged in traditional rows and columns, like financial information and shipping information. In contrast, you might take something like an admission system at a university. It might have some core intake information that’s structured, like a name and birthdate, but then there’s a lot of other information around it, like transcripts and reference letters, that goes into making a decision. Another example is in hospitals, where you have a doctor or nurse looking into a patient file. All hospitals have information systems that keep track of the basic information on a patient. But then there’s other information — like blood tests and X-rays — that’s unstructured, which the doctor will want to look at in order to make a better-informed decision. As you go around in all industries, there are a lot of examples of this sort of data. It really appears in all business environments.

And yet, the core business is still printers and printing. And for myself, I find myself printing a lot less, sending things I need to refer to to my iPhone or iPad and skipping the printer. Do people like me represent a long-term danger to you, or is that really just an issue of perception?

When you look at information generally, the amount of information and content that’s being generated just continues to grow. The ability to access it in an organized fashion is a key challenge for customers, whether they print it or not. But with that growth in information, even if a smaller percentage is printed, there’s still an opportunity for growth in absolute terms. But having said that, as our strategy has evolved, if a customer chooses to print it or store it, we’re going to be there for them. We’re trying to put the tools and technology in place for whichever way the customer goes. There’s a number of industries — government is one, social services is another — where there are customer-facing industries, where you need to fill out a form or a document that requires a signature; many still prefer paper, because it’s inexpensive and easy. Some choose to do that digitally, some choose paper. And when we talk to customers, they’re asking for help in bridging those two worlds. That’s where we jump in and help.

What is the most important thing that customers are saying to you, in terms of their needs? Is it all cost control, which is top of mind so often these days? Or is it something more?

Cost control is certainly there, as is lower-cost devices. These are certainly propositions that play well with customers who want to reduce the cost of their imaging infrastructure. When we engage customers in the managed-service relationship, they often don’t even know how many printers, copiers, fax machines and scanners they have, until we help them assess it and optimize it and hook their devices into a system that helps them control it all. And our managed print services are helping them keep those costs under control. The other thing we’re hearing about is process improvement. With Perceptive, and now Pallas Athena, we help them understand better what their processes are. We have a lot of technologies that map these processes out — not what you think they are, but what they really are. So many times, when you do process improvement, you spend months in a conference room, drawing out what you think the process is on a white board. We can eliminate that step by plugging in the tools and doing a quick digital assessment of what the process actually is, and map it for you digitally. So if you think your process is made up of steps A, B and C, we can come and show you that there’s also D, E, F and G that you didn’t think of. We’ll show you why they’re there, and where the bottlenecks are, with factual data you can work with. Which is a lot better than speculation.

Where do you think your competitors — and name whomever you want — are vulnerable? Where are you winning business away from competitors?

We turned 20 years old this year. Many thought we wouldn’t survive. I think, while the technologies have certainly evolved, the thing that has differentiated us from our competitors is our depth. We go deep with our customers, and get very intimate with them in their industry and their environment and their processes. That’s why customers buy Lexmark. When we’re up against people like HP or Xerox or others, we’re able to get closer to the customer than they are, and do things in a more customized fashion. I think we’ll be doing more of that as we fill out our technology set.

So what kinds of things should we expect from Lexmark in 2012? Are you done doing acquisitions?

You’ll see us enhance our capabilities. Some people think we’re moving away from printing, and that’s not it at all. But we’re adding to it. In addition to that, we’ll continue to integrate Perceptive and Pallas Athena into a more integrated suite of solutions. That will put us in a unique position. The acquisitions are part of the strategy. When we identify gaps or holes in our offerings, we look to fill them either organically or inorganically with acquisitions. We’ll continue to look at those as part of the strategy. We’re not looking for a big one. The ones we have done have been smaller, but of companies with technologies that have high potential for synergies. But we’re still looking.

Service offerings, such as managing E-ZPass highway-toll systems and supporting outsourced finance and accounting operations, continue to drive the Norwalk, Conn., company’s growth. Xerox also saw color-printer and supplies sales climb 9 percent, helped by the company working through a pile of orders that had mounted after Japan’s March earthquake and tsunami disrupted its supply chain.

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The winners include such big names as International Business Machines Corp., Novartis AG, Intel Corp., Abbott Laboratories, Xerox Corp. and runners-up Hewlett-Packard Co. and Yahoo Inc.

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Today, Fortune magazine released its annual “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” and, as usual, it had its share of tech execs on the list.

And off it, too — first and foremost being ousted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, who was jacked completely from her 2010 No. 10 rank. She was No. 8 in 2009.

In her place: Newly designated Hewlett-Packard CEO and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman grabbed the No. 9 spot.

Also on the list: fast-rising IBM sales, marketing and strategy exec Ginni Rometty at No. 7; Xerox CEO Ursula Burns at No. 8; Oracle President and CFO Safra Catz at No. 11; Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at No. 12; Google execs Susan Wojcicki and Marissa Mayer at No. 28 and No. 38, respectively; IBM North America GM Bridget Van Kralingen at No. 39; and Best Buy Americas President Shari Ballard.

Catz was the highest paid of the group, with $42.1 million in total 2010 compensation.

And also taken off this year: 2010 No. 14, HP’s Ann Livermore, who left her top job there, but still is on the tech giant’s board; 2010 No. 28 Cathie Lesjak, CFO of HP; 2010 No. 44 Lorrie Norrington, a former president at eBay; and Apple’s communications head Katie Cotton (she was robbed!), who was No. 50 in 2010.

The new list will be in the magazine on Monday, which is when a related conference will take place in Southern California. (I will also be in attendance there, along with other less powerful ladies.)

Whitman is scheduled to speak at the conference in the afternoon on Tuesday, October 4.

Yesterday, the Obama administration dribbled out the news that it was going to nominate current Commerce Secretary Gary Locke as the next ambassador to China.

If approved, Locke will surely have his hands full on a wide range of issues, many of them impacting the tech sector, including piracy, privacy and government-sponsored censorship.

Perhaps more interestingly, the move leaves open a post–which the Obama administration actually had a hard time filling initially–that could get a true turbocharge if it were filled by an exec from the fast-growing digital arena.

It’s not a bad idea, since tech is probably now the most critical business arena in the U.S. and one of the only markets in which this country innovates and excels at.

While the Commerce Department has a huge and disparate domain, from international trade to the census to promoting American businesses, its digital footprint has been much less profound than the industry’s increasing importance to the U.S. economy.

After all, despite some interesting international efforts, most of the current crop of tech stars are U.S. born and bred and leading the way in digital innovation.

In fact, every big trend right now in value creation are all coming out of tech.

Gaming? Zynga.

Social networking? Facebook and Twitter.

Retail? Groupon.

Mobile? Google and Apple.

So, why not pick a business person from the area to lead the government agency dedicated to business?

But that’s where it gets dicey.

One more obvious candidate would be outgoing Google CEO–and Obama favorite–Eric Schmidt.

I would assume he might welcome such a prominent post, although putting him in place at Commerce would be a tough road.

Issue one and only: The investigations of Google’s aggressive business practices by federal regulators make this an awkward decision for Obama, given Schmidt would be open to a lot of scrutiny going through confirmation.

But there is a long list of others who could be considered to serve, especially if you think well outside the box.

What about former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, who certainly has the management cred?

Or mega-VC John Doerr, who–despite his recent social fever–might finally get to push his beloved clean-tech agenda onto a larger stage?

What about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who recently showed she could deliver a boffo speech and who might lend some Silicon Valley magic to her former Washington, D.C. rep?

And while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ laugh would have a hard time getting Congressional approval, why not consider someone who has profoundly changed the way an entire business sector does business?

In that vein, Reed Hastings of Netflix also fits the bill.

Except these three execs are pretty busy these days. So, what about former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, whose failed bid to be California’s governor as the Republican candidate leaves her without a post.

President Barack Obama had picked a GOP pol as his second choice for Commerce head, in fact, so Whitman or even Cisco CEO John Chambers are not out of the question.

The point is to perhaps move outside the Beltway’s comfort zone and pick a Commerce Secretary who represents the future rather than the past.

Nuance Communications, a software company best known for its Dragon Naturally Speaking line of speech-recognition software, today announced a research agreement with IBM to explore ways to use the Watson system and its deep analytics technology in the health care industry.

The agreement calls for the companies to combine IBM’s Deep Question Answering, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning capabilities with Nuance’s speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding, which is basically speech recognition tuned to the unique needs of doctors and other health care pros. They expect products resulting from the research to hit the market within two years. Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine are also getting involved.

The hope is that Watson’s ability to analyze the meaning and context of spoken language and quickly sort through the information in it to find precise answers can help humans arrive at decisions faster, and arrive at answers they might not have otherwise thought of. A doctor mulling a patient’s diagnosis could use Watson to quickly check medical literature and help evaluate a decision.

Nuance has a huge health care segment, accounting for a little less than half its sales. The division includes Dragon Medical–desktop software for doctors–and eScription, which docs use to phone in comments that are converted to text that’s entered into medical records. It’s also been building voice-recognition apps for Apple’s iPhone, both for consumers and for doctors. IBM and Nuance will jointly invest in the research project, and IBM has licensed access to the Watson technology to Nuance.

Nuance itself is an interesting company. Spun out of Xerox in 1999, it started out in the scanning and text-recognition software business, and then in 2001 scooped up the assets of the bankrupt Belgian outfit Lernout and Hauspie using a combination of debt and cash raised in a private placement from the state of Wisconsin’s investment board. It turned out that speech recognition’s time had come, and as sales of Dragon improved, it proceeded to roll up scores of other companies in the speech- and text-recognition game, including one founded by Alexander Graham Bell himself. Sales were north of a $1 billion for the first time in the year ended September 2010, and its shares have improved considerably over the last year, though given its size, the stock often moves on takeover rumors.

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Companies are signaling they’re more comfortable spending money on technology now that sales and profits are expanding. “What drives tech spending are profits,” said Bill Whyman, head of tech strategy research at equity research broker dealer ISI Group Inc. Corporate profits have been surging the last few quarters and spending usually lags profits by three quarters, he said.

World-wide information technology spending is forecast to increase 5.1% to $3.6 trillion this year, according to market research firm Gartner Inc.

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Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Xerox Corp. Chief Executive Ursula Burns gave the K-12 school system a “D-minus” and said fixing it is a priority. “We can’t pretend to be better than we are,” she said. She added that when it comes to preparing students out of high school to be productive workers, the U.S. is failing.

The executives, however, said that the college system remains the best in the world. But they also agreed that valuable foreign talent who come over to the U.S. to attend colleges end up going back home because the country no longer welcomes them. Business have already gotten behind immigration, and the government needs to recognize this, said Cisco Systems Inc.’s CEO John Chambers.

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EHealth Inc., an online insurance broker, has won two new government contracts for insurance websites, and has established a separate unit to go after a share of the exchange business. Benefitfocus Inc., which makes software designed for enrolling employees and others in health plans, says it is in talks with nearly 20 states to run their exchanges. Xerox Corp.’s ACS unit is circulating a white paper to states to make its case for integrating exchanges into Medicaid systems the company already runs.

At stake is some $4 billion a year in revenue, according to an estimate by HealthConnect Systems, a tech company that aims to compete for the new business.

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Recently, there was an event in Silicon Valley to celebrate the 40th anniversary of PARC, the pioneering research facility that birthed a lot of tech’s most potent innovations.

Ever heard of laser printing or Ethernet networking or the graphical user interface?

Yes, that and much more.

PARC, by the way, stands for Palo Alto Research Center and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox (XRX).

Here are some videos from the celebration, including an alumni panel, as well as predictions for 40 years hence:

Over the past two years, H-P, Dell and Xerox have spent billions to muscle their way into better positions in tech services. The market, traditionally led by International Business Machines Co. (IBM), is regarded as attractive because it provides steady revenue from customers who pay recurring amounts to outsource their tech systems like email or payroll.

But even as the total number of new services contracts awarded each year more than doubled globally between 2000 and 2009, the amount spent on those new contracts fell to $74.5 billion from $90 billion in the same period, according to tech-consulting firm TPI.

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In lawsuits filed last week, Xerox (XRX) alleges that Google’s AdSense and AdWords and Yahoo’s Search Marketing, Publishing Network and Y!Q Contextual Search software all violate its 2001 patent for a “System for automatically generating queries.”

Xerox further claims that Google Maps, Google Video, YouTube, and Yahoo Shopping infringe on its 2004 patent, “Method and Apparatus for the Integration of Information and Knowledge.”

Xerox is seeking treble damages for the alleged infringements, which it claims are willful. Evidently, it attempted to negotiate licensing deals with the search companies that would have precluded legal action, but was rebuffed.

“We’ve been in dialogue with Google and Yahoo for some time without coming to a resolution,” company spokesperson Bill McKee told Bloomberg. “We believe we have no option but to file suit to properly protect our intellectual property.”

Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO), for their parts, dispute Xerox’s allegations. “These claims are entirely without merit, and we’ll vigorously defend ourselves against them,” Catherine Lacavera, Google’s senior litigation counsel, said in an emailed statement. A Yahoo representative offered a similar comment: “Yahoo does not believe we infringe and plans to fight this case.”

Big companies are increasingly hiring Xerox Corp. (XRX), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) and others to provide “managed print services,” a variety of outsourcing in which the vendor takes control of the customer’s production of office documents, typically owning the machines, advising on how to use them, and taking a per-page charge.

The office-machine makers promise to cut document costs by as much as 30 percent by reducing the numbers of printers and copiers installed on office floors and desktops, replacing them with multifunction printer-copier-scanner-fax machines.

World-wide managed print services will amount to $20.3 billion this year, up 47 percent from last year, according to Photizo Group, a Lexington, Ky., market researcher. The segment looks increasingly attractive to manufacturers in a year when shipments of printers, copiers and multifunction devices are down 7 percent to $49.8 billion.

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Alas, the Foursquare conference, hosted by the Quadrangle PE fund, is an invitation-only affair. And the event, which kicks off tomorrow, is closed to the press except for reporters onstage to interview the stars. And those conversations don’t get released to the public.

That’s a particular bummer this time. Because the Quadrangle guys–who have had a rough year–had the foresight to get a lineup that includes GE (GE) CEO Jeff Immelt, who appears to be in the final stages of selling NBC Universal to Comcast (CMCSA) CEO Brian Roberts, who will also be onstage. Sure would be nice to hear what they say.

Another panel that piques my interest, if only because of the title: “Are Popularity and Profitability Correlated?” It features Twitter’s Stone, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. And would-be moguls are represented by a start-up pitch panel that includes Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, the superbuzzy mobile service whose name has nothing to do with Quadrangle’s conference.

So once again, here’s the complete list of those you won’t be hearing from this week as they gather at the Plaza in Manhattan. Unless, perhaps, one of my more ambitious colleagues sneaks in–I’m thinking of you, Bobby MacMillan–and gets us a first-hand account.

2009 SPEAKERS
EMILIO AZCÁRRAGA President, Board of Directors and CEO, Grupo Televisa
DENNIS CROWLEY Co-Founder, foursquare
BARRY DILLER Chairman and CEO, IAC; Chairman, Expedia, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc.
BRIAN DUNN CEO, Best Buy
CHARLES FORMAN Founder, OMGPOP
REED HASTINGS Founder, Chairman and CEO, Netflix
REID HOFFMAN Executive Chairman and Founder, LinkedIn Corporation
CHAD HURLEY CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube
JEFF IMMELT Chairman and CEO, GE
PAUL JACOBS Chairman and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated
OLLI-PEKKA KALLASVUO President and CEO, Nokia
JASON KILAR CEO, Hulu
LESLIE MOONVES President and CEO, CBS Corporation
ANNE MULCAHY Chairman, Xerox Corporation
JAMES MURDOCH Chairman and Chief Executive, Europe & Asia, News Corporation
BRIAN PHILLIPS CEO and Co-Founder, Thread
DAN PORTER CEO, OMGPOP
BRIAN ROBERTS Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation
PAUL SAGAN President and CEO, Akamai
ERIC SCHMIDT Chairman and CEO, Google
IVAN SEIDENBERG Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications
BIZ STONE Co-Founder, Twitter
HOWARD STRINGER Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation
BEN VERWAAYEN CEO, Alcatel-Lucent
DAVID ZASLAV President and CEO, Discovery Communications

MODERATORS
MARC ANDREESSEN General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
KEN AULETTA Author and Writer, “Annals of Communications”, The New Yorker
MARIA BARTIROMO Anchor, Closing Bell; Host & Managing Editor, Wall Street Journal Report, CNBC
JAMES CITRIN Co-Leader, Board & CEO Practice, North America, Spencer Stuart
DAVID FABER Anchor, Reporter, CNBC
MICHAEL HUBER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
BECKY QUICK Co-Anchor, Squawk Box, CNBC
GEOFFREY SANDS Director & Leader, Global Media, Entertainment & Information Practice, McKinsey & Co.
JOSHUA L. STEINER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS Anchor, This Week; Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News

Software giant Oracle (ORCL), however, is expanding into hardware, and has no interest in buying a services company, said Chief Executive Larry Ellison at an event for financial analysts on Thursday.

“We are really brilliant or we’re idiots,” Ellison said of his company’s $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems (JAVA), a deal that is currently being held up by European antitrust regulators.

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Cisco (CSCO) will pay nearly $3 billion in cash for the Norwegian videoconference company, which it hopes will bolster its position in videoconferencing. The offer values Tandberg at 11 percent more than its closing price in Oslo trading yesterday and at about 23 times 2010 earnings.

“This fits very well with Cisco,” Robeco NV’s Michiel Plakman told Bloomberg. “They will immediately become the most important player in the market and aren’t paying a ridiculous premium, so this is positive.”

Cisco’s tender offer has the recommendation of the Tandberg board and is expected to close in the first half of next year.

Aimed at snapping Xerox out of its funk, the acquisition and integration of ACS–which has 74,000 workers compared with Xerox’s 54,000–is a big gamble by a new CEO. But Ms. Burns, a Xerox veteran who took over in July, is seeking new markets as Xerox’s traditional copier and printer business faces pressure from rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ).

Investors frowned on the stock-and-cash deal, sending Xerox’s shares down 14 percent in New York Stock Exchange trading. The company is taking on more than $2 billion in debt, paying $1.8 billion in cash and tapping the capital markets to finance $3 billion.

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Fortune magazine–which never met a list it did not like to make–had a solid group of women tech types on its “50 Most Powerful Women 2009” roster, the annual survey it posted yesterday.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made the Top Ten this year, clocking in at No. 8.

Other women geek types–many from Silicon Valley–on the list include:

Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox (XRX) at No. 9; IBM (IBM) Global Sales and Distribution SVP Ginni Rometty at No. 11; Oracle (ORCL) President Safra Catz at No. 12; Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) Technology Solutions Group EVP Ann Livermore at No. 13; Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at No. 22; Charlene Begley, president and CEO, GE (GE) Enterprise Solutions at No. 27; Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay (EBAY) Marketplaces at No. 40; HP CFO Cathie Lesjack at No. 42; and, finally, Google (GOOG) Search Products and User Experience VP Marissa Mayer at No. 44.

The conference associated with the Fortune issue, spearheaded by Pattie Sellers, will take place next week, starting Monday, in Carlsbad, Calif.

Fortune is part of Time Inc., which is owned by Time Warner (TWX).

Bartz, Sandberg and others will be interviewed onstage, along with Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) chairman and CEO Warren Buffett.

Will BoomTown be in attendance, with my trusty Flip digital video at the ready? Yes, indeedy, so the lady geeks should beware–and I am talking to you, Sandberg!

Until then, here’s a cable television interview Bartz did today on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Clocking in at almost 12 minutes, it’s classic Carol, with sassy catchphrases and jokes about being a really tough lady, but with little new news–except for her saying she would have sold to Microsoft (MSFT) when it was offering $33 a share way back when, because she is not “stupid.”

Indeed not.

Here’s the video:

A slapstick Web video describing “Information Overload Syndrome,” or IOS, is aimed at getting viewers to think of Xerox (XRX) as a company that can help them manage and direct information rather than simply print or copy paperwork.

It looks like part of a trend of high-tech marketers pitching their products as cures for imaginary diseases. Microsoft recently invented “Search Overload Syndrome” — a problem that can be cured by using its new Bing search engine instead of Google (GOOG). It is spending around $100 million on the ad campaign.

Xerox is going cheap with its Web campaign. The company was once ubiquitous on television with Brother Dominic, the monk, making copies of illuminated manuscripts. Last year, Sports Illustrated rated its 1977 ad the third best Super Bowl spot of all time.

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Xerox says printing color using the new machine, which uses a proprietary “solid ink” technology, will be up to 62 percent cheaper than the price of current laser prints. Robert Palmer, an analyst with InfoTrends, a market research firm in Weymouth, Mass., said in a research report that the new product “could have a major impact on the office imaging landscape,” due to its pricing.

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We’re assuming more of the same … deterioration in the economic markets,” Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy said on a conference call with analysts. “That’s why we’re being so aggressive in terms of the cost reductions, so we can be assured of delivering the earnings growth that we expect in 2009.”

[Image Credit: The Great Copy Machine Epidemic]

Then, Apple, building on work done by Xerox, introduced computer systems that you could control without typed commands. Instead, you used a mouse to click on icons and menus. Microsoft soon followed with Windows, and today all consumer personal computers work this way, out of the box.

However, for some people, especially fast touch typists, removing a hand from the keyboard to use the mouse is annoying, and picking through menus is slow. They prefer to use keyboard shortcuts, but these shortcuts must be memorized and can vary program to program.

Now there’s a new software system that allows you to use keyboard commands to do common tasks. But this back-to-the-future system is different from the old approach. Its commands needn’t be memorized, because they are entered in plain English. And they stay the same no matter what program you’re using.

The system is named Enso, and it comes from a small Chicago company called Humanized Inc. Interestingly, Humanized’s president, Aza Raskin, is the son of the late Jef Raskin, an early Apple employee who worked on the Macintosh. Enso is dedicated to his memory.

There are two initial Enso products, which can be downloaded at humanized.com. One, called Enso Launcher, allows you to launch programs and switch among windows via typed commands. The other, called Enso Words, allows you to do spell-checking, even when the program you’re using doesn’t include that capability, and to look up the meaning of words. Both products also include a simple calculator and the ability to launch Google searches.

ENSO is dead simple to use. You just hold down the Caps Lock key and type an Enso command, which is displayed in a translucent overlay. Once the command is typed, you simply release the Caps Lock key to activate it, and the overlay disappears. If you type fast, it all happens in a flash.

For instance, to launch the Firefox Web browser, you just hold down the Caps Lock key and type “open firefox.” To look up the meaning of the word “proclivity,” you just hold down the Caps Lock key and type “define proclivity.” You lose the normal use of the Caps Lock key.

Enso Launcher costs $25, and Enso Words costs $40. Both have a 30-day free trial. For now, they work only on Windows XP — not the new Windows Vista or the Macintosh.

I’ve been testing Enso, and it works as advertised. Enso Launcher is simpler and seems more useful than Enso Words, partly because so many programs now have spell-checking. I wasn’t able to test the calculator and Google features, which were late additions to Enso.

Enso commands are even faster to enter than they might seem. The program auto-completes the commands as you start typing, and it provides the likely choices in its translucent overlay, which you can navigate with your arrow keys. Suppose you want to open the Windows calculator program. You hold down Caps Lock and type “open calc,” and Enso Launcher completes the suggested command “open calculator.” Even before that, when you typed “open cal,” the drop-down list appeared, with “open calculator” at the top.

In addition to “open,” Enso Launcher also has a command called “go,” which can take you to any open window or tab in a Web browser. While I was writing this paragraph in Microsoft Word, I held down the Caps Lock key and typed “go patriots” to get to the New England Patriots Web site, which I had open in a tab in Firefox.

There are also commands for quitting programs and for closing, maximizing and minimizing windows.

In Enso Words, you can select any text in any program, then hold down Caps Lock and type “spellcheck.” An overlay window appears, with your selected text. Any misspelled words are highlighted, and you can correct them by either retyping or choosing from a list of suggestions. When you’re finished, you just press Caps Lock and type “done,” and the corrected word appears where you were entering it. If the selected text contains no errors, Enso tells you it’s correct.

This spell-checker is clumsier than the built-in checkers in programs like Microsoft Word, but it might be handy in instant-messaging programs or Web-based email programs, or in other Web pages where spell-checking isn’t built in.

The “define” command also brings up a thesaurus, as well as dictionary definitions. In addition to typing the word you want to look up into Enso, you can also select a word already on your screen and just hold down Caps Lock and type “define” or “thesaurus” to get an answer from Enso. And you can select a block of text on your screen and use Enso’s “word count” or “character count” commands to measure it.

Enso isn’t for everyone. If you’re fine with the mouse, menus and icons, you may not want it. But for keyboard addicts, it could be a blast from the past.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.