Kevin Kelly has posted an interesting post called “Better Than Free.” It’s about what succeeds in a market where most assets are free.
“The internet is a copy machine….When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
Well, what can’t be copied?….
There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy… We can start with a simple user question: why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? …From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.”
Kevin argues the eight generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold. They are:
- Immediacy
- Personalisation
- Interpretation
- Authenticity
- Accessibility
- Embodiment
- Patronage
- Findability
How does this relate to user documentation?
Documentation is often very easy to copy in itself. However, documentation can also be a mechanism to help create these “generatives” in a product.
Furthermore, these generatives sound familiar to anyone who has ever attended a documentation conference debate on the future of technical communication; in particular: Immediacy Personalisation, Accessibility and Findability.
Perhaps the future value of technical documentation lies in these eight factors?
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