RE: Issues with distribution of technical documents

Subject: RE: Issues with distribution of technical documents
From: "Glenn Maxey" <glenn -dot- maxey -at- voyanttech -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 14:24:26 -0600

Hi Steve,

Regardless of what you deliver to customers, one way or another they
will be paying for the documentation (and its development). If you don't
make it an explicit line item, it will be built into the cost of the
product. How the customer gets billed is really a question for the
clever people in sales and marketing.

Even though I prefer getting printed manuals when I'm the customer, what
I do for my customers is a different story. It comes down to economics.

The number of customers purchasing the release, the frequency of the
release, printing costs, and shipment costs drove a previous employer to
do away with printing dead-tree manuals. Just for offset printing, the
real cost savings per unit occurred at about 500. We only had about 350
(repeat) customers, so every six-to-nine months after each release we
were literally throwing away left-over manuals.

The real expense to us was shipping all of those dead-trees both
nationally and internationally. (Moreover, the documentation delta from
release n to release n+1 was small compared to the entire documentation
suite.)

I admit that the $50k savings per release might be comparitively small,
but it is also not something to sneeze at either.

If we had more of a commodity product with unit sales per release in the
order of thousands and/or if our release cycles were much longer and/or
if our documentation suite was orders of magnitude below its 11k page
count, then continuing to print & ship our documentation would have
remained cost-effective.

Yes, through our HTML and PDF solution, we did push printing costs and
efforts to the customer. They may indeed have gotten our work in a
crappy form, particularly if they do what I do in raiding the supply
closet and re-using some ancient 3-ring binder advertizing some obscure
company who may have sold someone at our company something.

However, the customer didn't necessarily see it as crap. If they had
complaints, it was about the limitations of their own laser printers and
supplies. They could see and appreciate the "quality" of our work in the
electronic deliverables. Printing it out themselves gave them a
different sense of ownership. They print out only what they need.

True, they might have cussed at us once or twice behind our backs, but
given the frequency of the releases and the bulk of the material, no
complaints ever made it back to our department.

Another posting from Megan Golding made the valid commits:

"More informed customers will buy more product from your company," and
"The best
customers are informed customers."

I think that these statements really say a lot. At that particularly
company, we sent one documentation CD to the customers and let them do
what they wanted with it (like put it on a server). We provided
documentation to all optional components even if they hadn't purchased
it, because we needed to expose them to how they could do things more
efficiently by merely spending some more money.

And from my own experience using Microsoft products, I suppose I could
live with or without printed manuals. I like them while I'm at that
particular release, but inevitably end up throwing older manuals away.

However, Microsoft's trend over the last five years has been to not even
provide electronic documentation. Even though Word and Excel have Visual
Basic built in, you won't find the application specific VB APIs in any
of their standard documentation. To me, it makes their products and the
macro features much less usable.

I can barely afford their operating system. I can't afford Office, but
get it on my home system somehow like doing "remote off-site back-up
installations" of the software I have at work... you know <wink>, for
when my system at work crashes. Visual Basic Studio (or whatever they
call it) just to give me VB APIs into Word is well beyond my pocketbook.


However, if the information was available, I and others would use it...
a lot. Instead, I remain ignorant and create only simple, stupid macros.


Glenn Maxey
Voyant Technologies, Inc.
Tel. +1 303.223.5164
Fax. +1 303.223.5275
glenn -dot- maxey -at- voyanttech -dot- com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: SteveFJong -at- aol -dot- com [mailto:SteveFJong -at- aol -dot- com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 11:08 AM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: Issues with distribution of technical documents
>
<much snippage below>
> Now: Should I be happy if a client with 1,000 end users (say)
> nationwide gets *one* (1) copy of the documentation set, and then
never asks,
> or is offered, more? No, not at all! But what can we do about it?
>
> Once they've paid for the software, do our clients have the
> right to demand unlimited free copies in perpetuity? Should I give
them
> print-ready PDF files and be happy that they're tying up laser
printers all across
> the country, ... because we've saved printing costs
> and because our work (in crappy form) now has wide distribution?
>
> Should instead I print and distribute the documents myself?
> Should I charge for production costs, or try to recover development
> (planning, writing, review, editing, and management) costs as well?
> Won't we end up paying technical support reps $50 a
> call to answer questions that users could have found in their $5
documents
> if we hadn't all been too cheap to give them copies in the first
place?
>
> Or should my company just increase the price of the software to cover
> printing and distribution costs? Is, say, $100,000 a year in
> printer's and shipper's bills a good investment in customer goodwill
and
> wide distribution of information?

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