freak@cbnewsc.ATT.COM (c.e.malloy..iii) (04/11/90)
What follows is a reprint (without permission) of a letter that
was printed in the April 1990 issue of "SOFTWARE magazine. Any
comments?
Clancy Malloy
att!ihlpf!cem
Open Letter to Microsoft:
This letter is to inform you of my experience with obtaining
Microsoft's Operating System Software Development Kit 2.O.
Immediately upon receiving the kit, I called Microsoft to find
out where the manuals were. Microsoft's customer support
informed me that there were no printed manuals - they were all
"online."
Well, that's not entirely true - I did receive three small
manuals. One was for the online services. All the operating
system and program development support appeared to be via a
bulletin board. That was a good idea. Apparently Microsoft knew
that without a printed manual, it would be flooded with phone
calls.
Then there was the Editor Users Guide. Nice, but if I had my
choice of any manual, that would be dead last on my list. The
third manual was IBM's SAA Common User Access Advanced Interface
Design Guide. Apparently IBM thought it was important enough to
send a printed manual. It will be the first thing I study.
The support person pointed out that we could print the manuals on
our printer. Good idea. I'll send someone out to buy some
printer ribbons, another box of paper, hole puncher and some
binders. Then after we listen to hours of racket, we draw straws
on who gets to burst the pages and punch the holes. This all
assumes that everything goes well and the printer doesn't jam or
melt down on page 310. Of course, what we end up with is a
manual twice as big as it needs to be.
The person who made the decision not to include printed
documentation with a new and complex operating system, C
compiler, linker and software development toolkit was obviously
not someone who has to use it. For $39, one expects diskette
with readme file, a .doc file and program. For $2,600, one
expects and insists on a printed manual. The highly technical
nature of this work demands not only frequent references to the
documentation but that the material be studied in its entirety.
So how do I take an online manual home at night? Pack up the
model 80 and monitor in the back seat? Copy it to my portable,
on which it probably won't run? That's illegal. So I would need
to spend another $2,600. It could be that the integrity of the
OS/2 online information is so poor that Microsoft does not feel
confident in printing a developer's manual.
I have read Ed Iacobucci's OS/2 Programmers Guide and am
currently reading Alan Southerton's Programmers Guide to
Presentation Manager. OS/2 is so complex as a "PC" operating
system that it may fall under its own weight. The policy of not
sending manuals with the operating system and developer's toolkit
would seem to guarantees its collapse. Two years ago, after
learning about the type of commitment OS/2 would require, I -
like thousands of others - waited to see how OS/2 would fare in
the market. It is obvious why OS/2 is moving painfully slow.
Online manuals are a fantastic addition to OS/2, but they can
never replace the need for printed manuals.
Gary Hoff, VP of Engineering
ABC Development Systems, Inc.
Minneapolis, Minn.
jaz@icd.ab.com (Jack A. Zucker) (04/12/90)
It's typical of Microsoft. We bought their MS-DOS adaptation kit. The documentation was terrible, and all in readme files. The kit was beaucoup bucks. If you wanted support for the package, it was $10,000.00. The explanation for creating a boot sector and bootable disk was laughable, and the sample code didn't work. There were files missing from the disk so the "Make" procedure failed. Microsoft's own make program is so pitiful that they supplied a custom "imake.exe" which is an unreleased product. The BASIC adaptation does not allow you to add new key words to the language. Constants were supplied for things like MAX_SCREEN_LINES, but we found that many routines had the number 25 hardcoded anyway. In other words, junk. -jaz
roberth@microsoft.UUCP (Robert HESS) (04/12/90)
Clancy Malloy (freak@cbnewsc.ATT.COM) posts:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
What follows is a reprint (without permission) of a letter that
was printed in the April 1990 issue of "SOFTWARE magazine. Any
comments?
The letter he posted:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Open Letter to Microsoft:
This letter is to inform you of my experience with obtaining
Microsoft's Operating System Software Development Kit 2.O.
Immediately upon receiving the kit, I called Microsoft to find
out where the manuals were. Microsoft's customer support
informed me that there were no printed manuals - they were all
"online."
...[several paragraphs deleted]...
Online manuals are a fantastic addition to OS/2, but they can
never replace the need for printed manuals.
Gary Hoff, VP of Engineering
ABC Development Systems, Inc.
Minneapolis, Minn.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, I have comments...
There are a couple issues that exist here. One, is the reason that
documentation is 'online', and the other, is the fact that Gary was
given an incomplete answer by our customer support.
For the initial release of the OS/2 SDK, we had full documentation
printed up and sent out. With OS/2 still being in a formative stage,
quite a bit of this information was soon out-of-date, or inaccurate.
For subsequent updates and releases of the SDK, we chose to ship
'QuickHelp' (ie: online) documentation. If we had taken the time to
send our updates to the printer, get it back, send it out, it would not
only be _several_ weeks later, but much of this 'new' information would
again be out of date. By shipping our documentation in electronic form,
we were able to get the latest information to our customers,
_immediately_. This we felt was very important.
For those customers who were with us from the beginning, this was just
fine. They didn't need a dozen different versions of the printed
manuals. They just needed one, and accurate update information. Near
the end of the first SDK term, we sent out a new set of printed
documentation, the same as was now being offered through Microsoft Press
(and available in many bookstores).
For those of you just getting started with the OS/2-PM SDK, this of
course is a small problem. Many (all?) of you would like at least *one*
printed copy of the documentation. This is where Gary was given an
incomplete answer to his problem. No, we are not shipping the printed
OS/2 Technical Reference manuals with the SDK. OS/2 is still changing,
and trying to manage two different versions of the SDK releases (with
documentation for first time customers, without documentation for
upgrades) would just make it take longer for us to get our releases out.
Which nobody would like. But that is not to say that printed
documentation isn't available. Microsoft Press currently has available
all 4 volumes of the OS/2 Programmers Reference manuals (vol1&2: 29.95,
vol3&4: 19.95) These should be available at many bookstores, or you can
order them from any bookstore.
I have talked with Gary Hoff of ABC Development Systems, Inc. and
explained these issues to him. I was able to satisfy him, and he was
happy to learn that he could order documentation.
- Robert
__________________________________________________________________________
##### ####### | Robert B. Hess, Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA
###### ####### |-----------------------------------------------------
####### ####### | roberth@microsof.uu.net
#### ##### #### | {decvax, uunet, uw-beaver}!microsof!roberth
#### ### #### |_____________________________________________________
"...my opinions are strictly my own, and not those of my employer..."feustel@well.sf.ca.us (David Alan Feustel) (04/15/90)
I'm happy with the initial release of OS/2 v 2.0. I DO hope I will
soon get lots of information on writing 32 bit (virtual) device
drivers for v 2.0, since that is my main interest at this point.
--
Phone: (home) 219-482-9631
E-mail: feustel@well.sf.ca.us {ucbvax,apple,hplabs,pacbell}!well!feustel
USMAIL: Dave Feustel, 1930 Curdes Ave, Fort Wayne, IN 46805