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--- Erika Yanovich <ERIKA_y -at- rad -dot- com> wrote:
>
> Motivation
> ==========
> I noticed that many gave intrinsic explanations for the motivation
> question, things like we feel good about learning the product, it
> matters to us, etc. I'm not sure that's good enough. The minute
> companies could sell products without docs (beacuse they are easy to
> use), they will get rid of TCs. So far the status is that although
> only a few use the docs, you need them to make a sell, but this will
> probably change soon. To survive, we should move to write about more
> complex things. It doesn't make sense to work without adding value.
My experience leads me to disagree with the idea that the need for
technical documentation will ever disappear. For one thing, it is
difficult to make a system that is truly fool proof. As someone else
reminds us in a sig. line, they seem to be able to make fools more
foolish faster than systems can be made fool proof. So no worries
there.
Second, just because they make an interface easy to learn and use
doesn't mean that the underlying system doesn't need to be documented.
Plus, there will always be a market for the equivalent of "For Dummies"
books. There are a lot of people who need to comfort of having a book
to fall back on (even if they only use it as a pillow). <g>
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