The Future of Robo Help
During the opening segment of the WritersUA Conference for Software User Assistance, Joe Welinske, President of Writers stated that Macromedia has put RoboHelp on "sunset" and that RoboHelp will likely no longer be "in common use" within 2 years. To set the record straight, here is a detailed presentation of his information and conclusions about the current and future status of RoboHelp.
What did I say at the WritersUA Conference?
On March 21st, in Las Vegas, as part of the opening session of the WritersUA conference, a panel of pundits presented fifteen predictions about short and long term changes in the IT industry, the user assistance arena, and specific tools and technologies. One of my predictions was that "Two years from now, RoboHelp will no longer be in common use." By "common use," I meant that it would not be a Help authoring tool actively employed on a regular basis by most documentation departments in the software industry.
My prediction about RoboHelp was not simply a shot-in-the-dark statement done for entertainment purposes. Rather, it was based on numerous conversations that I had with current and former employees of Macromedia over the past six months. These employees were key players in the areas of marketing, administration, and software development. I gathered information from several prominent independent consultants. Observations about recent marketing moves are also part of the picture. Just recently, I had a telephone interview with Miriam Geller, Director of Product Management at Macromedia. My questions and her responses are included toward the end of this article.
Why do I think RoboHelp has been 'sunset'?
The crux of my prediction about RoboHelp is that the product has been informally sunset by Macromedia. The term "sunset" is used in the software industry to denote a gradual phasing out of development and support for a product. My various sources have confirmed that all development team members had either been discharged or resigned as of the first week of March of this year. By "development team," I am referring to the technical personnel who had been involved in creating new versions of the software and actively maintaining the existing code base.
Development cutbacks to the eHelp product line began right after the acquisition by Macromedia with the discontinuation of RoboPresenter, RoboLinker, and RoboPDF. This was followed by discontinuation of the RoboHelp for FrameMaker product and the termination of its product manager. Additional RoboHelp administrative and development staff were let go over the ensuing months, including CFO Anthony Olivier. At least two ex-RoboHelp developers have applied for jobs at other Help tool companies and have described the dismantling of the development staff. Through another source, I learned that there was a plan to export the maintenance of the RoboHelp code to India. This was confirmed by an ex-RoboHelp employee. More recently, the Macromedia internal deadline for moving the code maintenance to India had passed and a subsequent decision was made to discontinue that scenario entirely. 0
Many ex-Macromedia (eHelp) staff members were at the March WritersUA Conference as members of a new company called MadCap Software. Conversations with several of them confirmed, to varying extents, what had transpired with the RoboHelp product over the past months. The most recognizable face at MadCap Software (for much of the current RoboHelp user-base) is V.P. of Product Management Michael Hamilton. Mike was the last member of the RoboHelp development team to leave Macromedia. He resigned on March 7 from his post as RoboHelp Product Manager—a post he held for the past six years. Mike Hamilton discussed this situation in detail on a recent post to the TECHWR-L list.
In an interview with Chuck Martin at the WritersUA Conference, Mike noted that recent changes at Macromedia, such as the decision to no longer sell RoboHelp maintenance contracts, crystallized his feelings about resigning. The RoboHelp maintenance contracts that Mike referred to were a combination of support and new releases. The new releases aspect of the maintenance contracts has been killed and only the support component is now provided. Additionally, the Gold Support program has been eliminated for RoboHelp. Gold is the top tier of Macromedia Support. The key element that separates Gold from the less expensive support programs is access to Senior Level Product Support Engineers. On the global Macromedia Support page, RoboHelp is the only Macromedia product that does not offer Gold access to engineers as a support option. The RoboHelp Support page was revised on April 14 to note that the "Product Updates & Upgrades" component of support is no longer available.
On the marketing front, Macromedia cancelled their Exhibition appearance at the WritersUA Conference just three weeks before the event. My exhibition contact at Macromedia indicated that not a single person was available to staff the show. I was also told that there was nobody available to make any kind of statement to the attendees about the Macromedia absence. Our organization received a box of CDs and brochures to distribute at the conference in lieu of a personal presence by Macromedia representatives.
Macromedia is apparently also going to be absent from the upcoming annual conference of the Society for Technical Communication. They are not listed on the latest Exhibitor roster and a source has confirmed that they have cancelled their appearance. This gathering has been one of the main shows for the RoboHelp product team over the past ten years. The conference brings together over fifteen hundred technical writers, many of whom are either using the product or have an interest in it. Also, RoboHelp ended its long-standing Platinum sponsorship of the TECHWR-L web site in February.
What could make RoboHelp obsolete?
The actions described above lead to the conclusion that the future viability of RoboHelp is very much in doubt. Macromedia will likely keep the distribution center going, as well as some basic level of email support. The software will probably continue to be sold until revenues dip below a profitable threshold. However, a software product that is not evolving is shortening its lifespan. Eventually, IT industry developments will make a static RoboHelp obsolete. The most immediate threats are the upcoming releases of IE 7 and AOL/Netscape 8. Who will be available to fix the code if these browsers break the WebHelp component of RoboHelp? It is certainly possible that a new development team could be reconstituted in the future. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of new programmers digging into a decade of legacy code is very questionable. And if a new development team is the future solution, why would Macromedia eliminate all of the current experts in the first place?
Further down the road is the developer release of Windows "Longhorn" Help from Microsoft. This new Help system represents a significant leap forward in Help capabilities. Support for the Microsoft Help standard has long been a core source of revenue for RoboHelp. Any attempt to support Longhorn Help will require a considerable development effort, needing numerous programmers intimately familiar with the RoboHelp code. Another technology that will make the current version of RoboHelp obsolete is the continued growth of XML as the lingua franca of file formats. Making RoboHelp fully XML-compatible had been mentioned by RoboHelp developers as a key future feature.
I mentioned two years as a possible limit to RoboHelp's usefulness to most customers if active development has already ended. Depending on your particular needs, that could very well be extended by another year or two. According to Neil Perlin, an independent RoboHelp consultant and trainer, "external technical changes in the absence of a Robohelp upgrade will eventually make the product obsolete. Any changes in IE 7 that hurt WebHelp would clearly have an immediate impact; that's the biggest unknown." However, Perlin is more cautious about how soon other technologies would create a problem for RoboHelp. He predicts that "Longhorn will have an impact but, between the delay in its release and the required hardware and software upgrades, I don't see it having much impact before 2007. And as powerful as XML is, most people's XML and single sourcing needs today are met by X5's XML and single sourcing feature sets."
Didn't Macromedia buy eHelp for RoboHelp?
One of the aspects of this situation that makes it hard for people to believe is that RoboHelp has been and is today a very profitable product. As mentioned earlier, it has an enormous market share. It is also recognized as an extremely good product and it has won numerous awards. In the wake of the bursting of the Internet bubble, products with a positive cash flow are generally in short supply and tend to be valued highly. The assumption by many was that Macromedia recognized this, and that was the reason the company paid in the neighborhood of $65 million dollars for eHelp. Even for a company with projected 2006 revenues of $500 million, that's a lot of money. However, the wildcard is another product that came along in the eHelp sale—RoboDemo. Now renamed Captivate, this is an authoring tool that simplifies the development of Flash-based eLearning modules. An ex-eHelp officer told me that the top hierarchy of Macromedia had always been much more interested in RoboDemo than RoboHelp. RoboDemo/Captivate apparently fit very well into Macromedia's plans for its future product line, while RoboHelp did not.
What about people using RoboHelp today?
In my conference predictions, I was careful to remind the attendees that RoboHelp will remain the product that it is and people can continue to use it as is. If you have a version of X5, or an earlier version for that matter, it should continue to support your efforts well into the future. The capabilities of the currently shipping product are in no way diminished by the ending of active development. However, the impending mismatch with evolving technologies should and will be a concern for many documentation departments.
It would be prudent for all user assistance professionals to assess their needs and options. David Knopf, a specialist in online technologies notes, "For some time now, we've been recommending that our clients avoid starting new projects with RoboHelp and that existing RoboHelp shops plan for a future in which their workflow does not rely on RoboHelp. Macromedia's actions since acquiring eHelp strongly suggest that RoboHelp is now a dead end." William Meisheid of Sageline Publishing adds, "There are many ways to sunset products, some of which are user-friendly, many are not. This is not and with as large and loyal a user base as RoboHelp possessed, a bumbled shutdown will not endear Macromedia and their other product offerings to the RoboHelp user community and opinion makers."
It is likely that competing products will try and grab a share of the RoboHelp market. At the WritersUA Conference, ComponentOne Doc-to-Help announced the addition of a RoboHelp conversion feature. Other vendors have expressed an interest in doing something similar. It will not be a simple process to migrate a complete and robust RoboHelp project to another product and conversion tools will be necessary. Another issue is that currently no product clearly offers the same working paradigm and feature set as RoboHelp. Major competing tools present a markedly different approach to Help authoring. Either the competing tools will adjust, or retraining will be required.
A number of RoboHelp users with maintenance contracts have already expressed concern about what this all means for them. A few have mentioned that their support plans guaranteed at least one new release per year. I am not personally familiar with the details of what is and is not promised.
The story isn't finished
Subsequent to my comments at the WritersUA Conference, Miriam Geller, Director of Product Management at Macromedia, posted a note on the RoboHelp General Discussion Forum. It would be best for you to read it yourself and make your own assessments about what it means. It does not appear to invalidate any of the statements or assumptions in this article.
On April 13, I conducted a telephone interview with Miriam Geller. I began the discussion by asking her if she could confirm that an active RoboHelp development staff was no longer in place. Her reply was, "Macromedia takes an overall look at a team and makes adjustments. I can't comment on specifics." I asked how many developers are currently working on RoboHelp upgrades and maintenance as their primary responsibility. Geller replied. "There are people in the company who are knowledgeable about RoboHelp." I asked Geller who, if anyone, was acting as RoboHelp Product Manager in place of Mike Hamilton. She said she was personally fielding questions from outside Macromedia and sending them to the appropriate people. Regarding the moving of code maintenance to India, Geller had no comment other than to confirm that Macromedia has a facility there.
I asked about general development priorities and also about the impact of IE 7 and Longhorn Help. Her replies were "We don't talk about future releases."; "Macromedia has longer product release cycles than eHelp had."; "Macromedia has a big suite of products. What we're working on one day may not be a priority the next."
I mentioned that the canceling of conference appearances and sponsorships was fostering some unease about the level of commitment to the user assistance community. Geller said, "This is a repercussion of a product in the hands of another company. We're very targeted about the shows we attend. Decisions that eHelp made about which marketing efforts to support are not necessarily going to be shared by Macromedia. We make decisions to spend marketing dollars with best reach."
I asked how the termination of RoboHelp maintenance contracts was going to affect those who hold them and believe they are due a product update. Her reply was, "If they have a question, they should call customer support. Different maintenance plans have different longevity. If they don?t feel like they are getting an answer, they should escalate to me." Geller added that, "Macromedia is evaluating support for its products across the board." It is important to note that Captivate, with a small fraction of RoboHelp sales, currently offers Gold support (engineer access) and RoboHelp does not.
I asked why RoboHelp for FrameMaker had been discontinued. Geller said, "There is a long list of acquired companies where the products went away. The FrameMaker edition was a brand new product, unlike the original RoboHelp." She also noted that RoboHelp and Captivate were the key products in the acquisition, but would not provide more details about the acquisition strategies.
The acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe is now another element in this story. Possibly the Adobe executives might see a value in RoboHelp that the Macromedia folks did not. However, it appears that the RoboHelp advocates in Macromedia are all gone. Also, a small division like RoboHelp that was ignored by a $500 million dollar revenue company is going to seem even more insignificant in a company with income of $1.7 billion. In the short term, it is not likely that this will result in any positive movement toward a RoboHelp upgrade.
Final thoughts
This article and my prediction about the future of RoboHelp are not meant to be an attack in any way. RoboHelp is an important tool to thousands of developers throughout the world and they deserve to have as much information about the future of the product as possible. Our WritersUA constituency consists of about 10,000 user assistance professionals of whom an estimated two-thirds use RoboHelp. My own history with RoboHelp goes back at least thirteen years. I still have my version 1.0 of the product on a 5-1/4" floppy. From around 1992 to 1998, I actively used RoboHelp in contracting projects for a variety of software development clients. I was also one of the first people to conduct RoboHelp training classes. I designed my own RoboHelp training materials and traveled around the country doing RoboHelp seminars until around 1998. RoboHelp techniques continue to be a popular topic at conferences.
Making the prediction about the possible demise of RoboHelp at the WritersUA Conference was very difficult for me. To a large extent, RoboHelp was responsible for helping technical writers become accepted as members of the software development community. It was a tool that empowered us to create our own piece of the software puzzle without help from programmers. In the years before HTML, this was not a trivial issue. While the eHelp face of RoboHelp was often decried because of its overly aggressive marketing tactics, from a technical standpoint, the product was always at least very good, very often it was great. RoboHelp was frequently evolving, often pushing the envelope, and always attempting to predict what customers would like in the future. If it fades way, RoboHelp will be missed.
This will be an ongoing story. If you would like to make any contributions/corrections to this article, please send me an email or give me a call at 206-285-2605. However, I may not be able to respond to queries requesting additional details or opinions.
http://www.winwriters.com/articles/rh/index.html
Here is Macromedia's response to this prediction.
What did I say at the WritersUA Conference?
On March 21st, in Las Vegas, as part of the opening session of the WritersUA conference, a panel of pundits presented fifteen predictions about short and long term changes in the IT industry, the user assistance arena, and specific tools and technologies. One of my predictions was that "Two years from now, RoboHelp will no longer be in common use." By "common use," I meant that it would not be a Help authoring tool actively employed on a regular basis by most documentation departments in the software industry.
My prediction about RoboHelp was not simply a shot-in-the-dark statement done for entertainment purposes. Rather, it was based on numerous conversations that I had with current and former employees of Macromedia over the past six months. These employees were key players in the areas of marketing, administration, and software development. I gathered information from several prominent independent consultants. Observations about recent marketing moves are also part of the picture. Just recently, I had a telephone interview with Miriam Geller, Director of Product Management at Macromedia. My questions and her responses are included toward the end of this article.
Why do I think RoboHelp has been 'sunset'?
The crux of my prediction about RoboHelp is that the product has been informally sunset by Macromedia. The term "sunset" is used in the software industry to denote a gradual phasing out of development and support for a product. My various sources have confirmed that all development team members had either been discharged or resigned as of the first week of March of this year. By "development team," I am referring to the technical personnel who had been involved in creating new versions of the software and actively maintaining the existing code base.
Development cutbacks to the eHelp product line began right after the acquisition by Macromedia with the discontinuation of RoboPresenter, RoboLinker, and RoboPDF. This was followed by discontinuation of the RoboHelp for FrameMaker product and the termination of its product manager. Additional RoboHelp administrative and development staff were let go over the ensuing months, including CFO Anthony Olivier. At least two ex-RoboHelp developers have applied for jobs at other Help tool companies and have described the dismantling of the development staff. Through another source, I learned that there was a plan to export the maintenance of the RoboHelp code to India. This was confirmed by an ex-RoboHelp employee. More recently, the Macromedia internal deadline for moving the code maintenance to India had passed and a subsequent decision was made to discontinue that scenario entirely. 0
Many ex-Macromedia (eHelp) staff members were at the March WritersUA Conference as members of a new company called MadCap Software. Conversations with several of them confirmed, to varying extents, what had transpired with the RoboHelp product over the past months. The most recognizable face at MadCap Software (for much of the current RoboHelp user-base) is V.P. of Product Management Michael Hamilton. Mike was the last member of the RoboHelp development team to leave Macromedia. He resigned on March 7 from his post as RoboHelp Product Manager—a post he held for the past six years. Mike Hamilton discussed this situation in detail on a recent post to the TECHWR-L list.
In an interview with Chuck Martin at the WritersUA Conference, Mike noted that recent changes at Macromedia, such as the decision to no longer sell RoboHelp maintenance contracts, crystallized his feelings about resigning. The RoboHelp maintenance contracts that Mike referred to were a combination of support and new releases. The new releases aspect of the maintenance contracts has been killed and only the support component is now provided. Additionally, the Gold Support program has been eliminated for RoboHelp. Gold is the top tier of Macromedia Support. The key element that separates Gold from the less expensive support programs is access to Senior Level Product Support Engineers. On the global Macromedia Support page, RoboHelp is the only Macromedia product that does not offer Gold access to engineers as a support option. The RoboHelp Support page was revised on April 14 to note that the "Product Updates & Upgrades" component of support is no longer available.
On the marketing front, Macromedia cancelled their Exhibition appearance at the WritersUA Conference just three weeks before the event. My exhibition contact at Macromedia indicated that not a single person was available to staff the show. I was also told that there was nobody available to make any kind of statement to the attendees about the Macromedia absence. Our organization received a box of CDs and brochures to distribute at the conference in lieu of a personal presence by Macromedia representatives.
Macromedia is apparently also going to be absent from the upcoming annual conference of the Society for Technical Communication. They are not listed on the latest Exhibitor roster and a source has confirmed that they have cancelled their appearance. This gathering has been one of the main shows for the RoboHelp product team over the past ten years. The conference brings together over fifteen hundred technical writers, many of whom are either using the product or have an interest in it. Also, RoboHelp ended its long-standing Platinum sponsorship of the TECHWR-L web site in February.
What could make RoboHelp obsolete?
The actions described above lead to the conclusion that the future viability of RoboHelp is very much in doubt. Macromedia will likely keep the distribution center going, as well as some basic level of email support. The software will probably continue to be sold until revenues dip below a profitable threshold. However, a software product that is not evolving is shortening its lifespan. Eventually, IT industry developments will make a static RoboHelp obsolete. The most immediate threats are the upcoming releases of IE 7 and AOL/Netscape 8. Who will be available to fix the code if these browsers break the WebHelp component of RoboHelp? It is certainly possible that a new development team could be reconstituted in the future. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of new programmers digging into a decade of legacy code is very questionable. And if a new development team is the future solution, why would Macromedia eliminate all of the current experts in the first place?
Further down the road is the developer release of Windows "Longhorn" Help from Microsoft. This new Help system represents a significant leap forward in Help capabilities. Support for the Microsoft Help standard has long been a core source of revenue for RoboHelp. Any attempt to support Longhorn Help will require a considerable development effort, needing numerous programmers intimately familiar with the RoboHelp code. Another technology that will make the current version of RoboHelp obsolete is the continued growth of XML as the lingua franca of file formats. Making RoboHelp fully XML-compatible had been mentioned by RoboHelp developers as a key future feature.
I mentioned two years as a possible limit to RoboHelp's usefulness to most customers if active development has already ended. Depending on your particular needs, that could very well be extended by another year or two. According to Neil Perlin, an independent RoboHelp consultant and trainer, "external technical changes in the absence of a Robohelp upgrade will eventually make the product obsolete. Any changes in IE 7 that hurt WebHelp would clearly have an immediate impact; that's the biggest unknown." However, Perlin is more cautious about how soon other technologies would create a problem for RoboHelp. He predicts that "Longhorn will have an impact but, between the delay in its release and the required hardware and software upgrades, I don't see it having much impact before 2007. And as powerful as XML is, most people's XML and single sourcing needs today are met by X5's XML and single sourcing feature sets."
Didn't Macromedia buy eHelp for RoboHelp?
One of the aspects of this situation that makes it hard for people to believe is that RoboHelp has been and is today a very profitable product. As mentioned earlier, it has an enormous market share. It is also recognized as an extremely good product and it has won numerous awards. In the wake of the bursting of the Internet bubble, products with a positive cash flow are generally in short supply and tend to be valued highly. The assumption by many was that Macromedia recognized this, and that was the reason the company paid in the neighborhood of $65 million dollars for eHelp. Even for a company with projected 2006 revenues of $500 million, that's a lot of money. However, the wildcard is another product that came along in the eHelp sale—RoboDemo. Now renamed Captivate, this is an authoring tool that simplifies the development of Flash-based eLearning modules. An ex-eHelp officer told me that the top hierarchy of Macromedia had always been much more interested in RoboDemo than RoboHelp. RoboDemo/Captivate apparently fit very well into Macromedia's plans for its future product line, while RoboHelp did not.
What about people using RoboHelp today?
In my conference predictions, I was careful to remind the attendees that RoboHelp will remain the product that it is and people can continue to use it as is. If you have a version of X5, or an earlier version for that matter, it should continue to support your efforts well into the future. The capabilities of the currently shipping product are in no way diminished by the ending of active development. However, the impending mismatch with evolving technologies should and will be a concern for many documentation departments.
It would be prudent for all user assistance professionals to assess their needs and options. David Knopf, a specialist in online technologies notes, "For some time now, we've been recommending that our clients avoid starting new projects with RoboHelp and that existing RoboHelp shops plan for a future in which their workflow does not rely on RoboHelp. Macromedia's actions since acquiring eHelp strongly suggest that RoboHelp is now a dead end." William Meisheid of Sageline Publishing adds, "There are many ways to sunset products, some of which are user-friendly, many are not. This is not and with as large and loyal a user base as RoboHelp possessed, a bumbled shutdown will not endear Macromedia and their other product offerings to the RoboHelp user community and opinion makers."
It is likely that competing products will try and grab a share of the RoboHelp market. At the WritersUA Conference, ComponentOne Doc-to-Help announced the addition of a RoboHelp conversion feature. Other vendors have expressed an interest in doing something similar. It will not be a simple process to migrate a complete and robust RoboHelp project to another product and conversion tools will be necessary. Another issue is that currently no product clearly offers the same working paradigm and feature set as RoboHelp. Major competing tools present a markedly different approach to Help authoring. Either the competing tools will adjust, or retraining will be required.
A number of RoboHelp users with maintenance contracts have already expressed concern about what this all means for them. A few have mentioned that their support plans guaranteed at least one new release per year. I am not personally familiar with the details of what is and is not promised.
The story isn't finished
Subsequent to my comments at the WritersUA Conference, Miriam Geller, Director of Product Management at Macromedia, posted a note on the RoboHelp General Discussion Forum. It would be best for you to read it yourself and make your own assessments about what it means. It does not appear to invalidate any of the statements or assumptions in this article.
On April 13, I conducted a telephone interview with Miriam Geller. I began the discussion by asking her if she could confirm that an active RoboHelp development staff was no longer in place. Her reply was, "Macromedia takes an overall look at a team and makes adjustments. I can't comment on specifics." I asked how many developers are currently working on RoboHelp upgrades and maintenance as their primary responsibility. Geller replied. "There are people in the company who are knowledgeable about RoboHelp." I asked Geller who, if anyone, was acting as RoboHelp Product Manager in place of Mike Hamilton. She said she was personally fielding questions from outside Macromedia and sending them to the appropriate people. Regarding the moving of code maintenance to India, Geller had no comment other than to confirm that Macromedia has a facility there.
I asked about general development priorities and also about the impact of IE 7 and Longhorn Help. Her replies were "We don't talk about future releases."; "Macromedia has longer product release cycles than eHelp had."; "Macromedia has a big suite of products. What we're working on one day may not be a priority the next."
I mentioned that the canceling of conference appearances and sponsorships was fostering some unease about the level of commitment to the user assistance community. Geller said, "This is a repercussion of a product in the hands of another company. We're very targeted about the shows we attend. Decisions that eHelp made about which marketing efforts to support are not necessarily going to be shared by Macromedia. We make decisions to spend marketing dollars with best reach."
I asked how the termination of RoboHelp maintenance contracts was going to affect those who hold them and believe they are due a product update. Her reply was, "If they have a question, they should call customer support. Different maintenance plans have different longevity. If they don?t feel like they are getting an answer, they should escalate to me." Geller added that, "Macromedia is evaluating support for its products across the board." It is important to note that Captivate, with a small fraction of RoboHelp sales, currently offers Gold support (engineer access) and RoboHelp does not.
I asked why RoboHelp for FrameMaker had been discontinued. Geller said, "There is a long list of acquired companies where the products went away. The FrameMaker edition was a brand new product, unlike the original RoboHelp." She also noted that RoboHelp and Captivate were the key products in the acquisition, but would not provide more details about the acquisition strategies.
The acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe is now another element in this story. Possibly the Adobe executives might see a value in RoboHelp that the Macromedia folks did not. However, it appears that the RoboHelp advocates in Macromedia are all gone. Also, a small division like RoboHelp that was ignored by a $500 million dollar revenue company is going to seem even more insignificant in a company with income of $1.7 billion. In the short term, it is not likely that this will result in any positive movement toward a RoboHelp upgrade.
Final thoughts
This article and my prediction about the future of RoboHelp are not meant to be an attack in any way. RoboHelp is an important tool to thousands of developers throughout the world and they deserve to have as much information about the future of the product as possible. Our WritersUA constituency consists of about 10,000 user assistance professionals of whom an estimated two-thirds use RoboHelp. My own history with RoboHelp goes back at least thirteen years. I still have my version 1.0 of the product on a 5-1/4" floppy. From around 1992 to 1998, I actively used RoboHelp in contracting projects for a variety of software development clients. I was also one of the first people to conduct RoboHelp training classes. I designed my own RoboHelp training materials and traveled around the country doing RoboHelp seminars until around 1998. RoboHelp techniques continue to be a popular topic at conferences.
Making the prediction about the possible demise of RoboHelp at the WritersUA Conference was very difficult for me. To a large extent, RoboHelp was responsible for helping technical writers become accepted as members of the software development community. It was a tool that empowered us to create our own piece of the software puzzle without help from programmers. In the years before HTML, this was not a trivial issue. While the eHelp face of RoboHelp was often decried because of its overly aggressive marketing tactics, from a technical standpoint, the product was always at least very good, very often it was great. RoboHelp was frequently evolving, often pushing the envelope, and always attempting to predict what customers would like in the future. If it fades way, RoboHelp will be missed.
This will be an ongoing story. If you would like to make any contributions/corrections to this article, please send me an email or give me a call at 206-285-2605. However, I may not be able to respond to queries requesting additional details or opinions.
http://www.winwriters.com/articles/rh/index.html
Here is Macromedia's response to this prediction.
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