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Comment by _fjb4 | Hacker News Reader

I had a friend tell me recently that he had to teach a (high school) intern how to navigate the Windows taskbar and use the Control-C and Control-V shortcuts on the keyboard. I thought he was joking until he mentioned that the student mostly used mobile devices at home and school and rarely used a PC. Apparently schools nowadays are replacing their laptop fleets with iPads and all that.

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Back in the day you would learn this stuff from an actual, printed manual. Proper documentation was a major part of what you got when buying a retail software product, even when bundled with OEM hardware. Where's the user's manual for modern OS's? Even the inbuilt "help" documentation has disappeared.

Prompted by your post I went looking for some, typing 'help' into the start menu search in Windows 11. An app came up called Get Help.

It opens with an ad banner at the top: "Increase productivity and collaboration all while staying organized, using a new meeting solution designed for small businesses. Learn More". Out of morbid curiosity I chose to Learn More but "We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found."

There are several features in Get Help beyond the primary feature of linking to a broken URL. You can sign in, you can rate your experience out of five, or you can send feedback. There is no Contents or Index, but there is a search box with a few suggested searches like 'How to install Office'. I tried searching 'how to copy paste' (without quotes) but "Your search did not match any solutions." It suggested I sign in to contact support. Closing the app is a little tricky because the minimise/maximise/close buttons are the wrong colour - white on pale grey.

Before closing the app, I selected a rating of 1/5, although my rating had been cleared upon reopening.

This sounds a lot like my experience with the Help menus in Adobe stuff, I haven’t been able to get to my expensive art tool’s menus from within it for years. I miss when it came in a box with a printed brick of a manual.

The empty bloatedness of a stinking, rotten cadaver. And countless vultures fighting over the last pieces. Or trying to sell them.

I would struggle to write a satire of the situation worse than the reality.

In case things change, for future readers, here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/aToMCtE.png

> Prompted by your post I went looking for some, typing 'help' into the start menu search in Windows 11. An app came up called Get Help.

I just tried F1 in both Firefox and JetBrains Rider. Nothing. I wonder when that one disappeared. Though at least both have a proper online help.

edit: Trying it in all open apps, some kind of help opens in MS Teams, Discord, Outlook and Directory Opus (file manager).

I haven't purchased a supposedly user-friendly mobile device in a long time but I don't really recall them having an initial tutorial or something along those lines. You just go through the setup and they toss you at the home screen. In contrast I think the old Androids (when smartphones were just coming out) had a tutorial teaching you how to swipe, pinch zoom, and so on. The assumption is that people know how to use this stuff "intuitively".

The big legacy software suites still have actual help pages and PDF manuals, while the mainstream stuff just has a FAQ on their web page.

MBA: "Tech writers are a cost center. Cut them and we get a fat bonus"

Documentation is sooo oldfashioned. Instant action for satisfaction!

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