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Another month
Jul. 25th, 2006 10:30 amWell, I've almost let another month go by without writing anything here.
I do possibly have some interesting news (that people on TooMUSH are already aware of), but I'm not going to say anything about that here at this time until I have more to report. (How's that for cryptic?)
In the meantime, though, I'm going to make a prediction and record it here so that it's all properly timestamped:
I reach this conclusion based on the number of hits I receive to my personal website from www.google.co.in from people searching for "ant manual pdf". It's been steadily growing, and I haven't been updating the pdf manual I have - it's still the manual for ant 1.4, some three or four years out of date at this point. Those programmers in India really want the documentation in printed form.
This isn't to say that I think it would be worth translating most documentation into Hindi - first off, most programmers in Bangalore are as likely to have Kannada or Gujarati as their home language, and secondly it's not really about India per se. India's just a convenient term for "wherever people are outsourcing programming to these days". I'm also getting a tolerable number of hits from Singapore, Romania, and Hungary. I even got a hit from Sri Lanka this past month, with a search for "Ant documentation Manual PDF".
I do possibly have some interesting news (that people on TooMUSH are already aware of), but I'm not going to say anything about that here at this time until I have more to report. (How's that for cryptic?)
In the meantime, though, I'm going to make a prediction and record it here so that it's all properly timestamped:
Software aimed at the average programmer will succeed or fail based on whether or not someone in India can find the manual online and print it out.This means that having the only useful English documentation to your product be in a book selling for $30 at the local Barnes and Noble is not sufficient. It also means that webbook-style manuals alone are not sufficient. Sybase, which has had its documentation in webbook-style manuals forever has figured this out - note how they have here both the online and pdf versions; contrast this to Microsoft, who seems to think that it's okay to make documentation freely available, but not easily printable. PDF files that are locked so that they can't be printed are likewise worthless for getting your documentation to that printer in India.
I reach this conclusion based on the number of hits I receive to my personal website from www.google.co.in from people searching for "ant manual pdf". It's been steadily growing, and I haven't been updating the pdf manual I have - it's still the manual for ant 1.4, some three or four years out of date at this point. Those programmers in India really want the documentation in printed form.
This isn't to say that I think it would be worth translating most documentation into Hindi - first off, most programmers in Bangalore are as likely to have Kannada or Gujarati as their home language, and secondly it's not really about India per se. India's just a convenient term for "wherever people are outsourcing programming to these days". I'm also getting a tolerable number of hits from Singapore, Romania, and Hungary. I even got a hit from Sri Lanka this past month, with a search for "Ant documentation Manual PDF".