I used to use a system like this for my software, and unfortunately I found that it did a terrible job of educating users. People would work through the entire tutorial (~5 minutes), get to the end, and then email/call me with questions that were covered in the tutorial.

I switched to just showing a few short videos demonstrating things and it works much better. It's disappointing because I was really excited about the potential of an interactive guide (and I spent a long time building it), but I can't argue with the numbers. My guess is that users were so focused on completing the steps that they didn't bother actually looking at the software, so they didn't retain anything. I can confirm that this is what happened with me when I clicked through to the link above. I clicked through all of the bubbles and finished the tutorial without reading a single word of text on the actual page.