Good Documentation = Good Marketing

In a recent post Scott Bellware reminds about the need of good documentation for a project to gain acceptance. For years, MSDN has been the hands-down best documentation bundle, in my opinion. Over 1Gig of reference material, samples, articles, etc—can’t beat that. These days, blogs are the best help, but still…

The purpose of marketing is to create a customer. Without good documentation it’s difficult to lure people in. Event Microsoft doesn’t call us “developers” any more. We’re “customers.”

Well, I'm not seeing the MSDN library as the best documentation out there. I remember the first time I put my hands on PHP I found their documentation so easy and essential that I was astonished. All you needed to know was simply there, no need to search through thousands of pages to find a solution for a common problem.
MSDN is big, but too much fragmented, information concerning a single topic is spread all over, and to find what you really need you have to seach a lot, too much in my opinion.

I dispute his thesis about open source. Postgre has exceptional documentation, too. Microsoft knows they have some edge in documentation, and in fact it is one substantial competitive factor. But open source is not allergic to good documentation. Open source is not only programmers. Technical writers work on it too, right? Microsoft has its share of problems. MSDN doesn't impress me, at least the way it hits me through the web. But Microsoft pays serious dollars for this advantage.