On Wed, 15 Sep 1993 15:46:45 PDT "Dwight M. McCann"
<[log in to unmask]> said:
>I would certainly expect that if we are paying for a Program Product
>that effort would be directed to its support, in terms of documentation,
>prior to development of new platforms.
The only problem, of course, is that 10 sites dropped out over the
summer. That's $33,250 we won't collect for sure. At first I thought this
was because people usually wait until the summer to make major changes -
that 10 sites is what was going to be lost this year. Unfortunately,
we're in September and I keep being informed of impending removals for
October and November. Aside from the direct impact, people who have plans
to get rid of VM (meaning 80-90% of our customers) aren't going to pay
for LISTSERV if they are not convinced they'll have a VMS or unix version
soon.
>Hell, Eric, contract the documentation for the VM versions out to Ben if
>you're under pressure to develop new code.
Money is not the issue here, and no matter what happens the documentation
will not be written by me, because that's just not something I'm good at,
not to mention efficiency. The problem is the amount of time I will have
to spend working with technical writers rather than writing code. The
EARN documentation plan gave me a concrete example of what it takes to
simply proofread a document written by a technical person with years of
experience with the network and VM, but who doesn't know LISTSERV by
heart. I wrote a thousand lines of mail and spent countless hours reading
and re-reading and re-re-reading and finally realizing it didn't help for
me to read any more, because I was too used to the text and would not
spot mistakes any longer. And that's for just one document of 35 pages,
and again the author was a network expert, if not a LISTSERV expert.
This isn't to say L-Soft won't write documentation, but the amount will
depend on our ability to find a setup not requiring the programmers to
spend too much time working with technical writers, especially if they
aren't in the same city and this translates to thousands of lines of
mail. We can't allow documentation to slow down development because if we
do, there won't be anyone willing to buy our nice documentation when it
is ready :-) And, of course, "hire more LISTSERV experts" is sooner said
than done. Most already have a good job, many don't want to work with
documentation, and technical people in general are not good at writing
documentation for users who don't know anything about computers (which is
why L-Soft's documentation coordinator is a genuine user - you know, the
type that looks at a perfectly reasonable manual and says "This is
awful!!! I don't understand a thing!!!!!" :-) ).
>Dwight (Another not yet paying customer complains about lack of
> documentation for a not yet purchased Program Product!) McCann
Hmm... Maybe I should point out something. You are not going to pay for
LISTSERV, but for LISTSERV software updates and customer assistance. You
got a free, indefinite right to use license from me when you first
ordered the software, valid until you leave BITNET (or until BITNET
dies). In other words, it's not fair to complain that L-Soft's top
priority is not writing documentation as soon as possible given that
people are now required to pay for the software, because in this respect
you are not a paying customer. You will be paying for new versions,
between-release fixes and customer assistance, which logically would
include documentation updates (for new functions and the like), but you
have still not paid for the base product (which would include the initial
documentation). If we charged for the right to use and everyone paid, we
would collect a bit less than $2M, and with that kind of money I can't
imagine how we could fail to convince enough LISTSERV experts to get a
better job and enough technical writers to work 25h a day so you can get
the full documentation in 3 months :-)
Eric
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