Yeah, I agree with that reaction to the Snowball manual too... audience considerations would have helped with some of the organization. Slick, but... somehow still hard to read.

You know, I continued to read the comments on Kathy's post after I posted. One I particularly liked said basically, Technical Writers should be user advocates, good designers, and able to convey complex user information in an easy to read way. That statement rings true to me.

So the other truth that I've been pondering (and I should probably save it for a blog post, but here goes) is that there's this entire market for publishers of technical books -- even with titles like "the missing manual!" Now that is marketing for technical doc, I'd say. These are $30 a copy and printed in black and white with a nice cover and binding. Somehow those are filling a void that users find valuable. There's still a "right mix" for marketing and tech doc but I'm not sure the formula is easily uncovered. O'Reilly and other publishers are close to the right mix though.