Last night I had dinner with two other ex-Microsoft employees who are career technical writers and editors. We all wanted to return to Microsoft and were finding the road now led to India. The rumor seems to be that Microsoft is farming out more and more documentation work to India. As a prospective employee, that news was surprising. As a consumer, I started to think about how I use technical documentation and who provides it.
I am a programmer so I tend to live in Visual Studio or SQL Query Analyzer. My documentation needs generally are either language syntax and usage via Microsoft’s MSDN site or solution-based articles via a Google search.
So what should Microsoft’s direction be for technical documentation? I see a rich multimedia experience to aid quicker adoption of new products. Does that mean script writing instead of traditional documentation? Possibly, but not covering every kind of documentation. API syntax will still need to be searchable. General and new concepts may be better as part of a visually-rich presentation. Solutions could be more of a video capture of the computer screen while solving the problem.
So technical writing, like traditional publishing, is evolving for the better.
