Realizing the Value Add

So why does a software vendor deliver manuals and other documentation? I spent years exploring this question. My answer led off in one direction towards expertise development, which leads to customer retention and upgrade sale revenue. This was an enterprise benefit. By linking content across the enterprise into pre- and post-sale enactment chains and increasing the opportunities for interactions with that content, content retained the customer and leads to upgrade revenues. There was profit in this, if anyone did it that way. Nobody did it that way. We were part of development, not marketing.

Others explored the question as well. Their answers led them to the cost management of content. They hinted that there was no value to the vendor except for cost reductions in the vendor's other content delivering business units.

So here we were doing something that just cost money. but nobody really knew why. Some executives had it right, like the checkbox in the magazine review. Of course, there were customer expectations. How many people would buy software if it didn't come with a manual? No one. How many people would buy software if it didn't come with a usable interface? Everyone. Well, that is the real behavior of the system. Manuals were somehow supposed to make up for the poor interfaces. I've papered over enough bad interfaces during my career. Some applications punched right through the wallpaper.

So this whole paradigm is expectation driven. A checkmark in the review checkbox was an expectation. Those expectations didn't just arise out of thin air. Nope. The big vendors like Microsoft, Novell (once upon a time), WordPerfect Corp. (a more recent yesterday), and Lotus built those expectations. These guys were market dominators. They didn't have to serve individual customers. They served markets. The revenue outcomes would have been the same. And, they, the vendors in that league today, still spend lots of money on content.

What wouldn't have been the same is that there would have been more competition. The expectation of content forced startups to try to mimic the content produced by the big vendors. Microsoft provides a user experience person for every five developers. And, this user experience person specs content, but doesn't create it themselves. They manage a much larger contractor force. A startup, however, hires one technical writer per product. Maybe fewer if they can keep their release dates spread out. Startups spend a lot of money trying to overcome the market barrier that is content. So the startups look for every shortcut they can to meet the expectation without necessarily meeting the purpose.

Looking high and low for the value adds and finding them in an unexpected place means that content strategies are meaningful in unexpected ways. Like Spath finding that manuals cost him money, invisible money, implicit costs, or waste even when they were free. So you have a double-sided market, so of speak, where content costs vendors, but its the cost of entry, and content costs the customer, but its the cost of reading. They pay to enter, they pay to consume. These are the true costs of content.

We manage these costs if at all by accident. Startups pay to produce, which isn't necessarily seen as paying to enter. Customers pay for functionality unaware of the bundling of disfunction in the offers they consume.