I reply to your "I don't RTFM" TalkBacks

Tech support types everywhere use the term to describe callers and customers who ask dumb questions because they haven't taken the time to read the documentation that came with the product.

Several of you decried my attitude as reflexively ignorant. But one reader, abogey, immediately picked up on where I was coming from.

In a TalkBack abogey wrote called "The real message he is trying to get across," abogey writes:

While I agree that you should RTFM, I believe what the original poster was trying to say is that products should be well enough designed and their instalation procedures should be robust enough that instalation should JUST WORK.
Most people in the world are not as tech savy as those who read and post to forums like this. They don't want to become savy either, they just want the toys and tools that they buy to work as soon as they get them home. 

Congrats "abogey," you hit a "hole-in-one" with that TalkBack.
You are exactly right, abogey. Original products should be well designed to be intuitive from an installational and operational standpoint. The problem is that engineers tend to live in a world of their own, think differently from the rest of us, and too often, give usability the short shrift. Marketers for those same companies talk about usability, but too often receive finished betas as fait d'accompli rather than become involved in the actual, architectural product or software development process.
And then, the customer support folks - who are just as likely to work for an outsourcer than be employed by the company that built the product or software - are the last ones to find out about bugs and workarounds.