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August 31, 2006
Printed docs
Printed docs: Good discussion here at Jim Rutherford's place about current documentation realities... he starts by describing how he prefers papers docs to screen docs for Flex 2, and gets info in comments about how these will be printed & available at Adobe Store soon. (More info from Matt Chotin, here.) The killer comment on Jim's blog, though, is from "greg h", who tabulates the pagecounts of seven of the nine books which accompany the Adobe Flex 2 generation of technologies. If it's all bound & printed into every box that's a lot of waste, because not all people would want all books, yet all would be forced to pay for them. Documentation range is increasing, as is price-sensitivity... there's work to be done here on making it easier and quicker to get paper versions on demand, but the discussion on Jim's blog pointed up the increasingly large footprint of software documentation today.
Posted by JohnDowdell at August 31, 2006 02:49 PM
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When a software vendor ships a pdf instead of the printed book, the user incurs the cost of printing the book. It is more costly for a user to print one book for themselves than it is for a software vendor to print a run where the cost is distributed over the complete population of uses.
[jd sez: Of course, but the point I raised here was that there's (figuratively ;-) tons of books, and the "include all docs paperbound" imperative would incur *greater* consumer cost in pre-printing and distributing things an individual may neither want nor need. We (as a species) are trying to balance all costs, not just minimize a single one of those costs.]
I don't know anyone that loves reading from a screen.
The real costs of the documentation has nothing to do with printing. The real waste involved with documentation has nothing to do with printing either.
Reading is an activity that only intuitively creates business value. To the customer's accounting system reading, self help, salary for in-classroom training, desktop training, time user spends on the phone talking to technical support is all WASTE, aka, in Gartner speak, "negative use costs." None of these costs show up in the TCO, because Gartner couldn't document them in terms of being on the books that back in 1988.
If the underlying model of the domain could be built without homogenizing the underlying cultures to make an application efficent to develop, then operational use would improve greatly. Until then we have UI myths, aka wallpapering over bad models matters, and documentation.
Posted by: Dave at September 4, 2006 01:15 PM