Killing trees

I discovered via Technorati that Michele Marques over at BMC commented on my blog in What does documentation mean to you? This made me muse about documentation produced by vendors. Software manuals are an absolute waste of paper and do nothing but kill trees.

This does not mean I think that documentation is a bad idea, I think that the context in which they are produced is wrong. Often documentation is presented from the vendor's point of view and not the customers. Customers need a set of documents that is tailored to their requirements (the unnecessary stuff shouldn't be included!)
Each customer has different requirements, thus the view of a vendor's product would be different for each instance. The vendor's documentation should be constructed in a template manner that allows it to be tailored and enhanced over time. It should directly reflect the customer's operational implementation. The set of documents provided by a vendor for a system must be as unique and individual as a custom chopper.