Bubble Your Pleasure, Bubble Your Fun

["Robert Plamondon" <robert -at- plamondon -dot- com>]

> The gist of my argument is this: The microprocessor created a temporary
> bubble in demand for technical writers because it put so many immature
> technologies in front of a public who had no previous experience or social
> support to guide their learning of them. Lots of ordinary consumers and
> office workers suddenly had strange new toys that needed documenting. This
> phase of the microprocessor revolution is largely over and we are
returning
> to normal levels of demand for technical writers.

It's probably safe to say that the demand for voluminous consumer-level
documentation is erratic over time.  The computer revolution filled
everyone's bookshelves with manuals and books, while the VCR and digital
watch revolutions did not. A digital watch requires about two pages of
crummy documentation to allow the user to limp along.  A VCR requires maybe
16 (32-64 with all the blah-blah-blah safety and FCC boilerplate).  Doing an
equally incompetent jobs for a computer system (hardware, software, and
operating system) requires hundreds or thousands of pages.

As others have pointed out, the engineer-to-engineer and
engineer-to-technician tech docs don't go through these booms and busts, and
probably follow the general market. As products get simpler on one level,
they get more complex on another.

One of the great constants of the universe is that engineers never stop
working.  The flow of new products has its ups and downs, since R&D costs a
lot of money, but it never stops.  A lot of new technologies were developed
during the Great Depression -- color movie and camera film,
pressurized-cabin airliners, affordable superheterodyne radios, television,
radar, and many medical technologies.

	-- Robert
--
Robert Plamondon
President, High-Tech Technical Writing
robert -at- plamondon -dot- com
http://www.plamondon.com/HIGHTECH/homepage.html
(541) 453-5841
"We're Looking for a Few Good Clients"





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