Re: Know the New Economy

["Elna Tymes" <etymes -at- lts -dot- com>]

Andrew Plato wrote:

> Hasn't Betamax, Novell, Apple, or SCSI taught us anything. Being "the best"
> DOESN'T MATTER. The new economy does not always reward the best. It rewards
> those that can move, change, and distribute quickly and effectively. Like it or
> lump it, products such as Word and Windows are here to stay and they will
> continue to dominate the market.

I mostly agree with Andrew on this one.  Word is not as good as Frame for
multi-chapter documents and for some other "power user" applications but it
succeeds because of two things: (1) it's pervasive: most people out there using a
word processor are using Word, and if you want to be able to exchange files with
them, you use their format; and (2) it's good enough for most users - and "most
users" are not technical writers tasked with creating big books with indexes and
multi-chapter cross-references and all the other goodies technical writers deem
important.

> The equation for success in today's markets is much more complex that just
> "doing the right thing."  You must possess a certain market finesse and be able
> to quickly produce and distribute products (documents).  Many corporations fail
> because they are too damn slow at responding to market forces.

Which is why they frequently distribute buggy software and hope to patch it up with
subsequent releases, and why the manuals that go along with said software are
likely to be inadequate.  When speed in time to market is more important than
quality, these things happen.

> Many writers fail because they are too damn slow at responding to the volatile
> environment of today's business. Obsessing over every tiny detail in a document
> may FEEL like the responsible thing to do, but it is not necessarily the RIGHT
> thing to do.

I doubt it's the writers who are slow in many cases.  In my (rather extensive)
experience, a decent writer will do as much as possible in the time frame allowed.
Project schedules are rarely dictated by the writers; more often than not they're
set in motion by project or program managers and the ones who slow things down are
more often programmers than writers.  That said, however, it's easy to blame the
writers for being slow when the programmers are continuing to slip freeze dates and
encroach on the well-known time that writers need after software freezes in order
to do even a moderately competent job.

It's not my experience that writers slow down delivery by obsessing over details in
a document.  Far more often than not, project delays are caused by programmers
changing their minds about how something should look or work, or because some bug
has cropped up that is difficult to fix.

So, Andrew - you're right about the market situation but wrong about the writers
being to blame.

Elna Tymes
Los Trancos Systems