From the Editor: Sometimes industries

Article
09/08/2016

From The Editor

Sometimes industries undergo seismic changes. This holds true not only for technology, but for politics, fashion, and everything else. I was thinking about this a few weeks ago when I was speaking at the Windows Connection conference in Las Vegas. Five years ago in November I would've been at Comdex—a huge show that served every possible segment of the world's technology buyers and learners. But the show, which had grown steadily for almost two decades, disappeared almost overnight. So instead of attending a huge, widely focused show, I was speaking at a very successful show that was narrowcasted, with an emphasis on a few developer and IT products. I was reaching the same people in the same location, but the scale was more rewarding for all those who attended.

My talk was all about technical writing—how to do it, where to do it, and why. The changes in our industry are reflected not only in the history of Comdex, but in the world of technical communications. Five years ago, I gave a similar session, and it was all about magazines. Back then, few people had heard of blogs. Community sites were just a shadow of what they are now. In the past five years, we have seen a permanent change in how the written word is transmitted, on a scale never seen before.

This is a mixed blessing, of course. Different forms of communication serve different purposes. People can put their thoughts online spontaneously, but having those thoughts appear in a magazine usually means that the words have been edited and technically vetted. You can pull a blog post down, but you can't go to everyone's house and ask them to rip out a section of page 28.

Anyway, there's a reason I'm talking about all this change. In response to the numerous readers who have provided us with feedback on the magazine, we are expanding our lineup of columns. In this issue, we are giving you the first installment of The Cable Guy, a popular TechNet online column that's now making the leap to the printed page. We also heard from all you postmasters, and we know that Exchange Server 2007 is about to become a big story, so we are launching Exchange Queue & A as a regular column. (Stop it, it's a cute name!)

If you'd like to see a Microsoft technology featured in the magazine, please drop us a line. The best way we can serve you is to give you what you need. —Joshua Trupin

Thank you to the following Microsoft technical experts: Puneet Arora, Jeff Bienvenu, Nino Bilic, Eric Broberg, Ramesh Chinta, Matt Cohen, Michael Dalton, George Irimescu, Bryan Jeffries, Dave Kong, Vijay Krishna, Rob Lefferts, Lawrence Liu, Bob Ma, Manu Namboodiri, Joel Oleson, Arpan Shah, Troy Starr, James Sturms, Jim Truher, and Blaine Young.

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