[teeray]

> Unfortunately, the time when it became easy to obtain technical documentation has coincided perfectly with the time when there was a tremendous decline in the quality of the technical documentation. Now it is easy to obtain technical documentation, but its content is much less valuable.

The past was also a time when professional technical writers were employed to write excellent documentation. It’s still been my experience that the best documentation for a product that I’ve worked on was written by dedicated staff. They approached it from the perspective of the customer and asked thoughtful questions whose answers were reflected in the resulting writing (and many times made me reconsider design decisions). I think ultimately, the ease with which online documentation could be updated (by comparison with the finality of print) led MBAs to shift writing responsibilities to engineering as a cost-saving strategy.