IBM is thrashing about, trying to find ways to reduce the erosion of profit margins.
Producing high quality product documentation is time consuming and necessarily involves the resources of many people. Internally, this is regarded as essentially pure overhead. When this is coupled with the belief that customers don't read the pubs much (yes, my management has told me this numerous times while not too harshly chastising me for spending too much time on producing documentation for product components which I've developed or modified), it's pretty easy to see and understand what's happening. The BookManager (.BOO) files are gone and it won't be long before the PDFs are gone too. The InfoCenter flavor of the documentation is also headed for the graveyard. This is a very disheartening trend. IBM mainframe customers (and competitors and non-customers) have long benefited from the availability of essentially free IBM product documentation, the great majority of which was accurate and complete. Those days are coming to a close. We all vote with our wallets and, as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for (but you usually get less). Bob
