50% of the questions on Stack Overflow are probably because the documentation was not great in the first place. I am surprised how much configuration/installation time I spend on there.
They just do stack overflow driven programming, question & paste.
or a pain to find when searching online in the first place...
Looks like GitHub is already getting ahead of this with the "Discussions" feature.
On that subject, Stack Overflow was just acquired for $1.8 billion.
For what it's worth, I don't think Prosus will make a mistake in this way -- the fact that they've existed all this time without me (or most people, I think) ever hearing about them means that they are good at what they do. Regardless of what their main goals are, I assume that I'll think it's likely I continue to not hear about them.
If it's actually not a simple subject or process, don't shortcut on the documentation.
Someone who needs handholding or is unsophisticated is a bad customer.
For developer tools and such, an educated person’s game, the sophisticated players will have better LTV than the unsophisticated ones.
I recently had to build a Word Add-In. Not a lot of those built at the moment. So we were dependent on the documentation, which while reasonably comprehensive, had some frustrating gaps in just getting the tutorial code running that took days to resolve.
A company selling a product that requires the customer to search third party documentation for usage is a bad company.
For software tools, an educated customer is going to choose companies that have products that help solve their problems, not ones that add to them (in the form of more work to seek out out-of-band documentation).