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It was a previous century when I last majored in anything, and it certainly wasn't English.
I was studying psychology and techie stuff. Finally went with the techie.
I'm not clear on "stock broker offices" and "what they did for the world".
The biggest slap that "the world" got from traders was not from traders of stocks.
It was from traders of debt derivative instruments -specifically derivatives of
bad debt, intricately disguised to look and smell much less revolting than the stuff they
were derived from. Those, in turn were built upon a rather too-wide
base of greedy and short-sighted, and often incompetent bankers, who
in turn were encouraged in the _strongest_ terms by a government that set
up the incentives and the rules and cheered from the sidelines.
I thought everybody knew that.
I mean, I didn't know it until it was explained to me, but by ____
it was explained over and over and over in the months and years
after it happened, in every periodical above the caliber of People
Magazine, and on news and public affairs shows at every stop
on the dial (if we still used dials).
To bring this back to relevance, I saw some good technical writing
in a number of magazines, _in addition_ to The Economist, which
naturally had very lucid depictions of how it all went kablooie.
From: Roberta Hennessey [mailto:rahennessey -at- gmail -dot- com]
Sent: January-16-12 2:09 PM
To: McLauchlan, Kevin
Cc: Connie Giordano; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: documentation going away
Everyone is born with their own particular skill set. To some people, English and grammar are easy. Some people excel in spatial skills and not English, and they can build what the English major cannot imagine. Not everyone in the world has the benefit of listening to people who speak what some consider proper English. It's like the song, walk a mile in my shoes. The most highly educated souls manned the stock broker offices and look what they did for the world......I am not very impressed with their great English or intelligence but that's their world, not mine. I haven't walked in their shoes.
On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 1:04 PM, McLauchlan, Kevin <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com<mailto:Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>> wrote:
> If user
> experience really is the watchword for 2012, I suggest senior
> management is
> really a long way from understanding how it works and what it means to
> their product management strategy (including training sales people to
> explain the most basic features to someone who obviously is replacing
> older
> technology).
There's the first stumbling block. Ever notice that the people
in those forums who post the most - including those who post the
most useful info - are the ones who update really expensive phones
every few months?
I don't know how they do it. Most of them appear to have English
as a second language... even though they're blatantly North
American (in other words, their first language appears to be
street-glop). Can there BE that many drug dealers who buy and
use superphones and take the time to learn their intricacies?
I thought it was de rigueur to buy cheap pre-paid phones and
toss them after a couple of days of ... um ... transactions.
Oh. Wait. I answered my own question. The street-talkin'
dropouts who use the superphones aren't the dealers, and
they aren't BUYin' the phones, they're the customers,
and they're stealing the phones to pay for drug habits,
but they use them for a while before pawning them. Ah.
And late at night, when the buzz is fading, but not gone,
they haunt the Android forums to trash-talk the Apple
fan-boyz. And they AND the Apple fan-boyz sneer at the
Win-phone users.
> I'd be curious to see what the customer satisfaction levels are for
> products that limit their support to a quick start guide and community
> forums.
>
> I have no interest in joining a community forum for my phone, it is not
> the
> center of my world, and I'd rather spend what little time I have for
> visiting forums on topics that are more important to me (to each his
> own I
> guess).
I have to join them, sometimes, to steer conversations
toward whatever topic or problem interests me at
the time. Otherwise, not.
I don't know how many other consumers feel this way, but I'm
> pretty
> certain I'm not the only one out there. And this goes for all sorts of
> products, not just phones.
Apparently, though, however many there are of us, we're in
the minority.
-k
PS: I write for biz-to-biz and biz-to-government, where
documentation is still demanded.
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Roberta Hennessey
Technical Writer
(978) 835-4282
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