'Technology Preview' vs. 'Technical Preview'

[cwickert]

TermWeb currently contains neither 'Technology Preview' nor 'Technical preview'. Both terms are in the Style Guide however, where 'Technology preview' is correct and 'Technical Preview' forbidden.

I'm afraid it's not that simple. :unamused:

Technology Preview

• used in documentation, 1100+ hits on documentation.suse.com
• we even have a section called 'Technology Previews' in the preface of every guide.
• the preface commonly shared among all guides, so 'Technology preview' is in doc-kit.

Technical Preview

• only 14 hits on documentation.suse.com, which boil down to 3 occurrences in the sources:
  • a single occurrence of 'Technical Preview' in a SLE Micro.
  • one is actually correct as it refers to "Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview". Obviously Microsoft is using 'Technical Preview', too. Same goes for Amazon, which then causes hits in the Partner Certification & Solutions Catalog
  • one is from the SLE 12 SP5 Docker guide. It seems we used 'Technical Preview' in the past.
• used in https://www.suse.com/products/subscription_terms.pdf
• used in some release notes. More often than in the docs, but least frequent than 'technology preview'.
• used in support documents, both update announcements and knowledge base articles
• used by Rancher
• used by some PMs

To make things worse, there are blog posts and release notes that use both terms as synonyms.

Summary:

• I started at SUSE 8+ years ago and never used something other than 'technology preview', but we seem to have used 'technical preview' more often in the past before consolidating to 'technology preview' in the documentation.
• We should be consistent at least in the docs, ideally across the company. But who is to switch?
• 'Technology preview' is also used by Red Hat, Apple, Adobe while companies like Microsoft and Citrix use 'technical preview'.
• Overall, 'technical preview' is more popular on the web, but only slightly.

[dariavladykina]

Here is another discussion on this topic: https://suse.slack.com/archives/C0598MWD8DC/p1716873866761219

[dariavladykina]

In my opinion, the best way for us is to stick to what we already have in the majority of documents. We can cooperate with the Rancher team once we start working on the docs together. We probably cannot influence some other teams using the other term, 'technical preview'. I can see 'technology preview' was entered into TermWeb and is now a draft.

[jfaltenbacher]

I am checking with Alex about her progress on this https://suse.slack.com/archives/C0598MWD8DC/p1716873866761219

[jfaltenbacher]

the slide deck with final decision on 'Technology preview' was just published: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Y83USO5Z0i-at67ZbVuEvoUbIY9sYYeOFARN4Vc0HKM/edit#slide=id.g2f0285a6334_0_857

[dariavladykina]

Thanks @jfaltenbacher for adding this to TermWeb. Closing this issue now.