BBC’s Rory “Read the manual? Never!” Cellan-Jones discovers the need for manuals

I wonder if the BBC’s Technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, is regretting posting an article in August called “Read the manual? Never!” . In it, he said:

It may be sad that we no longer seem to have that thirst for knowledge about how things work. But I’m afraid I’m just not going to start reading the manual.

I say this, because in his recent Blog post about Google Wave, he complained about the lack of user guides for the application:

We saw a lot of bugs that still need fixing, and no very clear guide as to how to do so.

Rory’s experiences with Google Wave – unfamiliar concepts, uncertainty between features and bugs, unfamiliar tasks – illustrate why it’s not always possible to do away with the need for user documentation and user assistance.

To his credit, when I pointed this inconsistency out to Rory, via Twitter, he said “it’s a fair cop!!!”.