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Comment by erichocean | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder why companies do stupid things—like this.

At the very least, put it in read-only maintenance mode, with a big disclaimer at the top saying so.

But to just destroy information, information about your own product, is…well, it's stupid. Profoundly so.

In my experience this sort of decision is always driven by sales / marketing people deciding they want to funnel the users into some other part of the site that nobody currently uses because it's not as good.

Bingo.

Not necessarily sales/ marketing, but an Old Thing is not a new thing you'll be praised for, it's just another annoying cost that comes out of your budget. Maintenance is boring.

Building a New Thing comes with excitement and praise.

Microsoft has done this so long their own people strongly recommend using URLs in https://aka.ms/ their long term link maintenance software, so that when yet another "exciting" change happens to their entire Microsoft web site you can still find all the vital documentation. Maybe their "Knowledge base" articles for example, will become a Wiki again, and then a social networking site, and then a blog the week after, and then a different Wiki with newly inscrutable URLs. But the aka.ms link can be updated so that you don't need to spend an hour navigating.

The more important maintenance becomes to a company's actual financial health the more senior management rebel and become sure their destiny is to radically reinvent the company. If directors did their actual job (working for the shareholders, for whom "exciting" aka "massively loss making" isn't the goal) the very next thing you'd hear after the CEO announcing the company has a new name, new branding, new logo, would be the Chairman arriving to tell everybody actually it's not a new name, new branding or new logo, just a new CEO, sorry, no big leaving do he was escorted off site by security.

Some marketing people cannot grok user-generated content and absolutely freak out over the perceived lack of control. It's completely irrational but I've had pinhead marketing droids kill my content before with no replacement plan. It's infuriating.

"Your bonuses are tied to the amount of traffic your blog posts generate" is such a 2020s KPI. And I've heard of more than one person whose compensation package has those metrics.

I think corporate upper management are the only echelon of business capable of such waste and cynicism, maybe they noticed that traffic was going to the wiki and not the dedicated support pages.

> But to just destroy information, information about your own product, is…well, it's stupid. Profoundly so.

From a purely historical/retrocomputing point of view, I'm really disappointed IBM took the legacy Library Server site offline.

It was full of fascinating detritus... old OS/2 manuals, various ancient layered products that IBM dreamed up once upon a time back in the 1990s or early 2000s and which never went anywhere (DDM, DCE, etc)...

Why couldn't they just donate the contents to archive.org or something like that, if they don't want to host it anymore?

At least they still have the offering information site online – https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ – full of product announcements from the 1980s. To pick some random examples:

https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common...

Sadly, I'm sure sooner or later the old stuff from there will be gone too.

There's a similar deal going on with Apple.

They still host a bunch of old classic Mac/Apple II files, but they're not longer browsable, you have to find old links to them.

E.g, here's the first floppy image to install MacOS System 7.5.3 http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Soft...

Their support site also still has a bunch of articles from the 90's in the database, you can still get them to show up in the searches on their own support site, but they're not browsable and hence not indexed by Google.

Anyone need help getting HyperCard 1.2.5 working on their Macintosh IIfx with the NuBus Macintosh Display Card 8*24 GC? https://support.apple.com/kb/TA46247?viewlocale=en_US&locale...

By the looks of the most recent snapshot on archive.org[0], that’s what they did.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200329185200/https://wiki.unre...

EDIT: It seems like the main problem is that they didn’t do a good job communicating their intention and timeline for removing the old wiki.

It had been in read-only maintenance mode for quite a while. Then they just took the whole thing down with no warning. The wayback machine copy unfortunately seems to be missing a lot of articles.

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