Adobe eLearning suite documentation failure?

Subject: Adobe eLearning suite documentation failure?
From: Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>
To: TECHWR-L Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>, Gregory P Sweet <gps03 -at- health -dot- state -dot- ny -dot- us>
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:44:48 -0400

Gregory Sweet reports: <<OK, so I get that it's not in vogue to
include manual with software anymore, but Adobe's really dropping the
ball. I just upgraded to eLearning Suite which contains a plethora of
CS4 products (Captivate, Acrobat, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc.() and
the more I get into it the more disappointed I become. Now, I am the
type that wants a paper manual. I read them, Cover to cover, and I
really think my productivity is better because I do.>>

I'm with you (I want a book), and frankly, it strikes me as an
astonishingly stupid choice even for a big company. For a product like
Creative Suite, there are probably thousands of third-party books
being sold, at a significant profit per book. Were it me running Adobe
(purely as practice for ruling the world some day), I'd create an
award-winning print-on-demand version of their manuals* (i.e., so
there are no up-front printing costs), and include a coupon for $10 to
$20 off the cost of that book so people could buy printed
documentation if they wanted to do so. Then I'd trumpet how "green"
Adobe is by reducing printing costs without forcing people to
sacrifice their beloved printed manuals, all the while banking the
profits.

* After all, it's not like the "classroom in a book" model is foreign
to Adobe. And it's not like documentation isn't already a sunk cost.
If you're doing all that work creating the online help and the PDF,
why not profit from it?

Better still, I'd add the $5 cost of printing a decent manual to the
product's cost, at the usual 1200% markup (for a total price increase
of about 0.1% -- insignificant to Adobe's captive audience), and use
the profits to pay for the full cost of developing documentation for
the product. Invent your own numbers and do the math -- it's easy and
fun!

<<In this case the help files seem to be the only manuals so I decided
to grab the PDF copies and print my own. No biggie, I get how it saves
costs and paper>>

Only if everyone in the audience has a duplex printer. If not, it
doubles paper consumption. This is what economists call an
"externality"; that is, Adobe saves a ton of money and gets rich doing
so, and everyone else pays the price. Not that there's anything wrong
with capitalism; after all, it brought you the current economic
crisis. (Before you light up the flamethrowers... just kiddin', guys.
Take a chill pill!)

<< — but for crying out loud as the maker of the market-leading
document single-source software, and actually having a product called
the technical communication suite, paginate for output! I don't want
something that looks like I printed the help file>>

That would require two big assumptions: (1) Someone's going to
actually read it. (2) Someone's going to actually burn out their
printer printing it instead of waltzing down to Barnes and Noble and
buying "CS4 for people who are too smart to print our PDF file".

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Geoff Hart (www.geoff-hart.com)
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Effective Onscreen Editing:
http://www.geoff-hart.com/books/eoe/onscreen-book.htm
------------------------------------------------------------------------

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

ComponentOne Doc-To-Help 2009 is your all-in-one authoring and publishing
solution. Author in Doc-To-Help's XML-based editor, Microsoft Word or
HTML and publish to the Web, Help systems or printed manuals.
http://www.doctohelp.com

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-

To unsubscribe send a blank email to
techwr-l-unsubscribe -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
or visit http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/options/techwr-l/archive%40web.techwr-l.com


To subscribe, send a blank email to techwr-l-join -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com

Send administrative questions to admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot- Visit
http://www.techwr-l.com/ for more resources and info.

Please move off-topic discussions to the Chat list, at:
http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/listinfo/techwr-l-chat


Follow-Ups:

References:
Adobe eLearning suite documentation failure: From: Gregory P Sweet

Previous by Author: Speaking of social, bad news (and some good) for Twitter
Next by Author: The pen is mighter than the sword
Previous by Thread: Adobe eLearning suite documentation failure
Next by Thread: RE: Adobe eLearning suite documentation failure?


What this post helpful? Share it with friends and colleagues:


Sponsored Ads