The Evolution of Product Documentation

From the GCFL archives (it has its own page).

Most documentation starts as hastily scrawled notes from sleep-deprived developers who weren't necessarily hired for their keen communication skills. Those notes are then fleshed out by recently graduated English majors who have spent their last four years immersed in works of fiction. The results are then passed on to the marketing department whose job it is to make sure that no word or phrase will reflect unfavorably on the product ("I don't think that the word 'Basic' properly communicates the exciting nature of the product. Why don't we call it 'Visual Zesty?!'"). It is then beset by lawyers who finish the job by making sure that they haven't explicitly promised that the product will actually do anything. By the time the documentation gets into your hands, it has been so sanitized for your protection and generalized beyond recognition that you usually have to go out and buy a 3rd-party manual (that was, more likely than not, written by the same non-technical technical writer who wrote the original documentation) in a vain attempt to get an unbiased, unexpurgated, and unfiltered view of just how you're really supposed to use the stuff.

Introduction, About The "@ Novell" Series, November 3, 1998

last update: 24 August 1999