Re:

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

Supply and demand.  For the products you're talking about, it's because the 
customers don't stop buying when documentation is reduced, so the 
manufacturers keep on reducing it for as long as customers don't stop 
buying.  The budget cutting generally follows rather than being the initial 
cause.  Pretty much the same reason why the price of gasoline keeps going up 
even though demand has fallen and refineries are exporting their surplus 
output.

In other cases, it's because customers are increasingly expecting and 
demanding products and systems that are more user-friendly and don't require 
studying and following step-by-step instruction manuals to use.  This 
doesn't really make documentation "go away," it just moves it under the 
hood.  A good consumer example is an ATM.  There's no customer documentation 
to speak of except the onscreen prompts in the UI, but the person who 
installs and services the unit gets a set of documents that rivals an 
encyclopedia for weight if it's printed.

You can probably see where this trend is headed if you want to continue to 
be employed as a technical writer.

Gene Kim-Eng



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ryan Minaker" <ryan -dot- minaker -at- gmail -dot- com>