Palimpsest: Surveying the landscape

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Palimpsest

Surveying the landscape

Friday, October 17, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe

Surveys are on my mind this week.

The HAT Matrix (Char James-Tanny) recently conducted a survey on help authoring tools. The raw results are available at their blog, the Mad Hatter. On the HATT list, a debate immediately erupted over whether the survey was skewed by MadCap Software.

"Intentionally skewed" is a rather loaded phrase. Let's just stipulate that the survey was mentioned by MadCap to their customers. Since Char made the raw survey results available, you can see that a little over 10 percent of the responses indicated a MadCap origin. One might assume that these participants will be heavy MadCap Software users.

If you attempt to adjust the numbers to account for this potential bias, you end up with RoboHelp and Flare basically neck and neck, whereas in the raw numbers, Flare is quite a bit higher.

And therein lies the rub. Look at the coverage that the survey is getting:

At Core Dump:

It seems that MadCap Flare has pulled well ahead of RoboHelp as the dominant help authoring tool, being used by about 40 percent of the respondents.

At I'd Rather Be Writing:

Madcap is not only a major competitor to RoboHelp, but it now seems to now have an edge on it.

If MadCap had not, um, encouraged their people to participate in the survey, we'd be seeing very different discussion. And these discussions shape perceptions.

People are also drawing the conclusion that DITA isn't happening just yet. This is possible, but the participants on the HATT (help authoring tools and technologies) list are not exactly the poster children for XML usage. We can draw the conclusion that the people who participated in this survey aren't using DITA, but I'm not too sure about anything beyond that.

In a related matter, there was a recent survey asking about structured authoring implementation. In this survey, one of the questions was about vendors/consultants who helped with implementation. It included the following seven options:

Not Scriptorium
Another Not-Scriptorium vendor, much smaller than Scriptorium
A conversion specialist
Another conversion specialist
Yet Another Not-Scriptorium
A Scriptorium competitor
And finally, you guessed it, not Scriptorium

You may imagine my conniption fit. No, go ahead and double that. Throw in a tantrum and some gutter Italian words and you're slowly getting there.

By any objective measurement, we should have been included on the list.

Perceptions matter. To a prospective client, our absence on this list sends a message. It basically says that we're not relevant enough to be included. Now, it appears that we were left off because of, um, mediocre research, but that doesn't mitigate the potential damage to us.

Incidentally, in a survey on structured authoring, I'm not too sure how you do a Google search for vendors and manage to leave us out because, well:

http://www.google.com/search?q=structured+authoring

So, in conclusion, I'm not feeling too good about surveys this week.

Labels: adobe, analysis, dita, madcap