RE: Current industry trends for technical writers

[<mbaker -at- analecta -dot- com>]

Reversion to the norm, really. The network is the natural environment for
computing. But the PC revolution jumped out ahead of the growth of networks
and forced us into an unnatural situation of having everything local on the
PC. This pushed all sorts of functions that should have been managed on the
back end on to the user's personal machine, where the end use has to look
after them. It also led to the large monolithic application that takes so
much training to learn and use, again because all the functionality has been
pushed onto the local machine. 

All this is an unnatural deviation from the norm, and now that networks are
ubiquitous, things are returning to the norm again, with the back end going
back to the network where it belongs, and applications slimming down in
consequence. (Event the word slims down as applications become apps.)

It was, of course, this intrusion of the back end into the lives of ordinary
users that created the need for the vast reams of end-user documentation and
thus the deviation from the norm in technical communication that allowed so
many of us to pay our mortgages over the last few decades. But at computing
reverts to the norm, tech comm reverts to its norm as well.

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+mbaker=analecta -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+mbaker=analecta -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf
Of Robert Lauriston
Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2016 4:03 PM
To: TECHWR-L Writing
Subject: Re: Current industry trends for technical writers

Cloud apps are just hosted versions of client-server apps with web clients.

Since customers do not install the server software, the installation and
operations docs are for internal audiences only.

This is nothing new, I've been documenting SaaS apps for 15 years. The
change is that it's becoming the norm.


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