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Subject:Re: The Consequences of Embedded On-Line Help From:Mike Stockman <stockman -at- jagunet -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 13 Nov 2000 19:04:08 -0500
On 11/13/00 4:59 PM, Dan Emory (danemory -at- primenet -dot- com) wrote:
>One might expect that case law regarding product liability,
>product acceptability, warranty, and related issues
>will soon begin to reflect the theory that the help is an
>integral part of the software, and defects in the help
>should be treated identically to defects in the software
>product itself.
Seems like a reach to me. I'm not a lawyer of course, but I haven't heard
about too many *successful* lawsuits dealing with bugs in commercial
software, where only data is at stake and no lives are lost or damaged.
There's a lawsuit brewing now about AOL 6 for Windows, the gist of which
is that there are bugs. "Big deal," I say, and I fully expect that the
suit (as with most of the previous "bugs in AOL" suit) will go away. Can
you point to cases where people have won liability cases about commercial
software (with or without embedded help)?
[Election stuff snipped]
>A team made up of plaintiff's
>attorneys and a few of plaintiff's power users
>could develop and put on a devastating live demonstration
>in a courtroom of the inadequacies of such inane help
>systems.
If lousy help systems were actionable, the suits would have been flying
for years, especially against Microsoft (which, until the last couple of
years, has had extremely inadequate help). I'm skeptical that embedding
help has any consequences at all, except that users can no longer carry
the manuals to read in the rest rooms.
----->Mike
________________________________________________________________
stockman -at- jagunet -dot- com -- AOL and AOL Instant Messenger:MStockman
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