On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Ryan Underwood wrote:
> >
> > They're not available anymore :( It's a real shame since they seemed to be
> > quite friendly towards open source developers at one point. I can almost
> > understand that they don't want to release any parhelia docs but I don't
> > understand why they stopped giving out the older docs...
>
> Must be some new management over there... *sigh*
Never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by laziness
or stupidity.
Maintaining documentation is not something companies tend to get paid for,
and they do it because it indirectly helps sell hardware: the better
supported the hardware is, the more likely it will work well, and the more
likely you'll get a good name and sales.
But when it comes to old hardware that doesn't bring the company any
revenue any more, the only reason to maintain documentation (even if the
"maintenance" is just having people be aware of it, and making it
available on a web-site and having the proper indexing to find it) is to
show that you're committed to your products, so that people who buy the
new ones can trust you.
And a lot of companies don't seem to think that it's worth the pain.
They'd rather screw their old customers over and try to get them to
upgrade to the new product. Which works well enough, I guess, since it
clearly is fairly rare to try to support your old stuff any longer than
absolutely necessary.
Sometimes consumer protection laws (especially in Europe) tend to have
_requirements_ that you have things like replacement parts and
documentation available for up to five years after you stopped selling the
product. At other times, contractual obligations with other companies
require the same.
But on the whole, technical documentation doesn't fall under that heading
(while pure "maintenance manuals" often do - if they existed in the first
place).
Major documentation policies usually only exist at the big old-time
companies. For example, I could buy the "Technical Reference: Personal
Computer AT" reference from IBM in 1991 - even though the thing was
written in 1985. Because a company like IBM tends to have all these
customers that really pay for _support_ more than new hardware. Their
paying customer base literally cares about the fact that they know that
they can get support and docs for hardware that may be quite old.
In contrast, think about the best customer base of a graphics card vendor
for a moment. The best customers there are the ones that upgrade once a
year, and if they throw away their old card in disgust because it no
longer plays the newest games titles, all the better.
I hope that will change. I _think_ it will change. But it's likely to
change only when we get rid of the "new gfx card every six months"
mentality.
Linus
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