Re: system administrators and documentation

[Gene Kim-Eng <gene -at- genek -dot- com>]

That wasn't actually what I was referring to.  To give a better example, a 
company
I worked for a few years back developed an instrument that had something like
30 possible applications.  Marketing determined that some 75% of paying 
customers
would be using 5 or 6 of these, so we documented the hell out of those 5 or 
6, and
a couple of others as well.  The remaining ones remained "undocumented," as in
we never said anything about them, or "semidocumented," in that we inferred 
from
the marketing materials that the instrument was capable of such things in 
"customized
configurations."  If a customer inquired about any of the un or semidocumented
features, the reply they got was "I can connect you to a Product Support 
Engineer
for a quote on a custom application."  However, the customers who bought the
instrument for those 5 or 6 most used applications always got all the 
documentation
they could ever hope to need on them.

Gene Kim-Eng



At 09:29 AM 5/27/2003 -0400, Brian Das wrote: