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In your vision of tech utopia, everything is on the public web, all
applications are updated continuously, and all customers are cool with
that. You seem to imagine that the only alternative to this utopia is
a tech dystopia in which tech writers are still writing linearly and
distributing printed manually.
In the real world, there's still a lot of installed software with
embedded online help. Once that ships and a customer installs it, the
help doesn't get updated until they choose to install a later release.
Is that a less than ideal situation? Yes. Would I prefer to put the
help on the web so I could update it at any time? Yes. Do I know how
to do that? Yes. Do I have a plan to do that? Yes. Are there sound
practical reasons for not having done it yet? Yes.
Lecturing working professional tech writers about how we're doing
things wrong is probably not the best way of promoting your consulting
business.
On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 10:39 PM, <mbaker -at- analecta -dot- com> wrote:
> Without the
> restraint of shipping paper, you can continue to make the content better and
> to add additional content, potentially through the life of the product.
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