Return to Help HistoryMore great Help memorabilia. Bill Meisheid ( Sageline Publishing) interviews with Joe Welinske (WinWriters now WritersUA). Thanks Bill for allowing us to republish this material on www.helpmvp.com An Interview with Joe Welinske
Joe Welinski, the president of Winwriters, who started the industry
leading WinHelp conference series six years ago, talked to Sageline's William Meisheid
about a few reflections on the past, present, and future of the conference and of Help
authoring in general.
Bill |
What kind of person comes to a
Winwriter's conference? |
Joe |
This type of conference appeals to the
person who wants to go beyond the basic authoring tool and has an interest in the more
advanced topics. I am continually surprised by how many people want to come to this
conference. |
Bill |
I remember you started out with about 35
people at your first event. Now, six conferences later, you have 900 people. I remember
you telling me at several points along the way that you thought the conference may have
maxed out. Yet each year it is larger. Why? |
Joe |
Well, I have a core group of continuing
supporters who come back year after year. But, also, the constant change over the last few
years to 32-bit Help and then HTML-based Help has given us new and interesting things to
explore. |
Bill |
Do you see the base of Help authors
exploding? With the universal adoption of Windows and many companies using the Y2000
situation as a motive to switch from mainframe and terminal-based apps to client server
and Windows-based apps, do you expect to see continuing growth? |
Joe |
While the industry as a whole is
growing, the number of managers and people who need the kind of information a conference
like this offers is a smaller part of the industry as a whole. There is a limit to the
growth, but fortunately each year we seem to have exceeded our expectations. |
Bill |
It appears that new technology or
directions add life and interest to a conference. What new thing do you see happening this
year to give new energy to the conference next year? |
Joe |
Due to the emergence of HTML as a broad
solution, I think the Unix market and cross platform Help will be a whole new area that
opens up and expands the current areas of interest. |
Bill |
What kind of crossroads do you see on
the horizon? |
Joe |
As the web has become a place where
applications will live, suddenly we have thousands of "Help" developers trying
to do Help. Laura LeMay [a bestselling author of HTML and web-related books] said early on
in this conference that she finds people at web conferences having frantic discussion
about how they are going to learn to navigate and come to terms with structure and links
and color and all that. And she tells them that the online Help people have dealing with
these issues for the last 10 years. They are not new issues. For me, it will become very
interesting when these two areas begin to merge. Will the web people push into the Help
area, and will we get more and more poorly done Help? Or are the Help people going to push
into the web and bring all the knowledge of the Help community to bear on the web? If that
happens, then you are talking about a hugely expanding scope of demand for Help. |
Bill |
What has been the biggest surprise for
you over the past six years? |
Joe |
The growth of the interest in Help and
the desire to come to conferences like this. It always amazes me. |
|