Evolution of Product Documentation


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