Motorola (was Industry Standards Resource)

["Janet Swisher" <swisher -at- enthought -dot- com>]

>One more question, a new writer in our
>group (a former Motorola employee) insists
>that Motorola is the trendsetter for tech
>writing industry standards. Am I missing
>something or is this malarkey?
 
 
I recently finished an 18+ month contract at Motorola, and have to say I
didn't see that in the division ("sector" in Moto-speak) I worked in. They
were not in the dark ages, but not trendsetters either. We were using
FrameMaker 6, hoping to one day integrate the (Tech Pubs) user-doc templates
with the (Engineering) spec templates. There was one tentative project to
use XML, with the impetus coming from Engineering, not Tech Pubs. The sector
had just brought online a new web content-management system, which was an
improvement over the previous disparate systems, but nothing revolutionary.
My former group recently completed a usability study of one of the doc sets;
this is a good thing, but hardly a new thing.

On the other hand, Motorola is an enormous company. For example, the
wireless phone sector is much more consumer-oriented, and the government
services sector might be more likely to use SGML. 

In any case, you need a stronger justification for whatever ideas this
person is pushing than "that's what we did at my old job".

--Janet