On Wed, 19 May 2010 09:54:57 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> There was an announcement a few days ago that Microsoft was also
>> shutting their newsgroups down (though I read somewhere that it was
>> only a "sort of" shutdown, not really a full shutdown).
> 
> Yeah, it's all "help yourself" web services nowadays. Even their online
> documentation has the "community input" sections at the bottom like the
> PHP documentation had for a long time.

Yeah, that's a trend that's been around for a while, but I can't say I've 
ever seen it used effectively.  It seems that companies think "if we put 
a place for people to comment/write/wiki/whatever they'll just 
participate" - and that's generally not the case.

> What's the point of buying proprietary software if you have to document
> it yourself, or experiment with it to figure out how it works even in
> normal cases?  Sheesh.

That's a pet peeve of mine today (just software documentation in general 
not being very high quality - I remember telling someone about a doc page 
that described a product UI by pointing out things like "the username 
field is where you enter your username" and "the login button is what you 
press to login".

Duh, smack me with a 25-story building, I never woulda' guessed that. >:-(

Jim

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