Noted rumor-monger  Brilliant Leap speculates about Documentum in a world without EMC. Tongues were already wagging at EMC World about the SAP-EMC partnership leading to something a little more intimate. It has enough of the smell of truth to make an irresistible rumor.

As rumors go, I still prefer the Microsoft angle because of the obscene anatomy kissing that IIG is still doing.  Truth is it’s just to easy to dispel: Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free? I doubt Microsoft will be stamping shrink-wrapped boxes of SharePoint with Documentum Inside! anytime soon, but I’d bet they have an infinite number of code monkeys banging away to make their own document management Hamlet. Once they do, it’s bye-bye Documentum! Then all those monkeys will get down to business and start flinging feces IIG’s way.

Part of Documentum’s doom was being a software company bought by a hardware company; however, it won’t be saved if another software company buys it next. Such companies (SAP included) would buy Documentum to augment their flagship product, not eclipse it.  With no Fairy Godmother rescue from being passed around from one wicked step-mother to the next, this story’s ending will be more Le Boheme than Cinderella. Or worse, a more-jackal-than-wolf company that hasn’t innovated for decades might gobble it up to suck the last trickle of marrow from its cracked bones.  *cough* computer associates *cough*

I am no Wall Street cheerleader, especially after my time in Big Finance, but the closest thing to a Fairy Godmother out there is a technology-oriented private equity fund. Such a fund buys troubled companies to turn them around and sell them for a profit. Unlike most of Wall Street, they take the long view of years rather than a quarter or the milliseconds around a stock’s uptick.

Their methods can be harsh, but their goal unlike any step-mother’s would be to make Documentum the best product and most profitable (and saleable) brand it can be.  There may still be an ounce of brand left to save. By going private, the recuperating Documentum wouldn’t be burdened with public company regulation or the tyranny of speculative stockholders. It’s an imperfect cure for the age of gratuitous IPOs and acquisitions fueled more by irrational exuberance than smart business.

We have a test case with AOL selling Bebo to Criterion Capital Partners, LLC instead of just shutting it down. Taking Valdes’s animal shelter metaphor a little further, I’m sure Criterion will euthanize Bebo and reap their own “meaningful tax deduction” if the old dog can’t learn new tricks. Sometimes I think I’d rather see that happen to Documentum than sit through the EMC’s little opera until the consumption takes it.

I can’t find a video of the Mark Lewis keynote from EMC World 2010. Instead I’m depending on reporting from the event like Ron Miller’s article [Documentum group gets new name and new direction] and Pie’s tweets and blog posts. It’s probably for the better; I never had a taste for gruesome videos since Faces of Death, and this may be EMC finally decapitating the Documentum brand.  Rather than plunging into a pages-long diatribe about EMC’s unconditional surrender to the commoditizing of content management or the latest dish of scorn Lewis served up to Documentum veterans, let’s talk names.

Information Intelligence Group is EMC’s new moniker for the product that shall not be named. Lewis breaks down the name for us on his blog [Episode 91: EMC World 2010 - The Birth of the Information Intelligence Group]. It’s hard to read–let alone say–the name with a straight face, and this breakdown doesn’t help. At least the cumbersome and uninspired Content Management and Archiving accurately conveyed something about the product.  This new name is too broad and inherently meaningless; it will continue to erode mindshare for a product that was the de facto definition of document management. Let’s hope this new name doesn’t prove itself a compound oxymoron to boot.

The “Intelligent” product silos aren’t much better. Granted, this is a product that has to publish a separate guide with each new release to map old product names to new. Not a sheet or a few pages, a document. However, these new silos are so vertically restrictive that EMC had to toss the content server into case management.  Having done case management and having paid my dues in lines of server code, I’m perplexed. It’s like they had a very limited box of magnetic poetry to play with.

The continuing erosion of a strong brand means less mindshare among potential customers. Everybody knows SharePoint even though most don’t know what it really is. I’ve seen first-hand how good marketing trumps good product. Documentum had that name recognition–still does in many parts–and EMC seems determined to stamp it out without something sticky to replace it.

Here we go again!

I wanted Twitter lists about five seconds after I clicked my second “follow”. My life is about categories and contexts: I follow people for different reasons, and I want to group those people and their tweets around similarities. Search and hash tags helped a little, but full-text search and uncontrolled tag vocabularies come with a host of problems–I know that all too well from my day job.  In the meantime, a Rube Goldberg of RSS feeds and multiple Twitter accounts provided some degree of order. Now Twitter’s on the eve of releasing lists, and I can’t say for sure I’ll even use them.

Twitter needs to advertise their betas better.

There’s no telling when I got the feature because I don’t use the Twitter website. It’s all about the client: Tweetie 2, Tweetie for Mac, or Google Reader. I even stopped going to the website from email notifications because they don’t have anyway to handle multiple accounts. The email may be about “A”, but I’d end up as “B” because that’s who I last logged in as. Yes, this is another case of clients having it all over web apps in terms of context and state. I hate living in a buzzword-compliant age: Web 2.0 is roughly Client 0.2 in my book.

An API is no substitute for a conceptual model.

I found the API calls for lists easily, but I never found diagrams or narratives explaining what lists are and how they work. Lists don’t appear to be very complicated at first, but it’s not just twiddling the two radio buttons and one text box on lists that creates complexity.  How things interact with lists internally and externally can create unexpected conditions and counter-intuitive behaviors. That leads me to my biggest initial gripe and likely deal-killer …

Lists do not have RSS feeds; they are a walled garden, and not in a good way.

Lists were looking pretty neat until I noticed something. Actually, I noticed the lack of something–an RSS feed icon in the address bar of Firefox. RSS lets me consume and crosspost Twitter anywhere–Google Reader, my blog, Facebook, FriendFeed. Right now lists are only available through the Twitter website, and that’s fine for a beta release (unless you’re Google). However, even when clients start supporting lists, people will still have to come to Twitter. Maybe that’s a hint that Twitter’s getting ready to monetize, or maybe that missing conceptual model contains some details that make RSS problematic.

A little more experimenting is in order …

Unmentionable!

When Twitter changed their reply functionality, now called mentions, my initial reaction was unmentionable.  After a few weeks to ponder and play with it, I still think they made a big mistake.  A reply was originally a message that began with a twitter username, like this:

@zorak No, really?

Replies were public, but Twitter added a link so you could see just your replies and options to filter other people’s replies out of your friends stream.  According to the Twitter blog, the community came up with the convention that Twitter later embraced and enhanced.  Then Twitter added a separate API call and a “swoosh” button to their web site:

Just what I wanted! Twitter added metadata underneath so that a reply remembered which tweet it replies to.  Pretty soon every Twitter client included swoosh buttons and “in reply to” links.  This was a philosophical break for Twitter–whether they know it or not–because there was no way to distinguish swoosh and “@user …” via SMS.  Supporting SMS creates a larger potential user base, but it drastically limits functionality.  Until everybody has an iPhone, fledgling social networks like Brightkite must consider this trade-off.

The original reply syntax is still supported and continued to create confusion as Tweetie developer AteBits explained on his blog.  People put multiple names in the message or put the @ in the body of the message, assuming the right people would see the replies:

@me @myself @I Remember the milk.
Give @me some sugar, @baby!

Only @me sees the first tweet as a reply; nobody sees the second.  Search was already catching on thanks to other community-grown initiatives like hash tags; users and client developers began using search on @user instead of the reply API to catch such grammatically incorrect tweets.  Apparently this is a bad thing, or at least something Twitter discouraged, perhaps because of its impact on Twitter’s call throttling.  That and other scaling problems should make for a few good dissertations; I just hope Twitter is keeping the historical record and will be willing to share it.

This brings us to mentions which are basically just searches on @user.  Although it’s a good thing that Twitter learns from their community, the big mistake here was changing the functionality under the existing API calls.  I agree that instantly supporting new functionality in all Twitter clients is attractive to a provider, but it can–and did–create unintended consequences.  All those clients blessed with catching those malformed reply tweets were also cursed by all those side-bar mentions crowding the replies page.  Twitterati like @wilw get many more mentions than direct replies, and now there’s no easy way to sort out the two.

The lesson here is that it’s safer to create new API and UI elements for new-ish functionality and let the community migrate over than to replace the guts and hope nothing breaks.  As any API designer knows, developers will do all kinds of unexpected things once your API is released into the wild.  The Twitter community’s active, inventive role in shaping Twitter also provides for some real “They did what?” moments.  Tweaking reply functionality to support only swooshes and adding new methods for mentions would have made everybody happy.

There’s one thing I want from Twitter that they promise in the API FAQ; I want to see all replies for a given tweet.  I disagree the assertion in the Twitter blog post above that people don’t want to wander into the middle of an ongoing conversation.  Sometimes that’s the best way to discover new topics and interesting people.  When that happens, there is a need to go back and discover the source and all its tributaries.  Twitter is aware of the need, as this quote from the Twitter API Wiki FAQ shows:

How do I get all replies to a particular status?
For now, there’s not a great way to do this. We’ve heard the requests, though, and we’ll be providing a solution for it before too long.

Conversation functionality is cropping up in Twitter clients like Nambu and the soon-to-be-released Tweetie for Mac (20 April 2009).  Looks like Nambu constructs conversations based on cached tweets, building little trees as it discovers reply pointers to other already-fetched tweets.  This single-linked list structure makes it easy to find your immediate predecessor but difficult to walk up, across, and back down the tree.

Hmm, where have I seen this problem before?  Oh yeah, version trees in Documentum.  Every document remembers its immediate predecessor (i_antecedent_id) and the root of its version tree family (i_chronicle_id).  A single query on i_chronicle_id returns every version of that document.  That’s just what I want Twitter to do!

Twitter already has its own i_antecedent_id–with a better name I hope.  So add an equivalent to i_chronicle_id and a new getAllReplies API call.  I suggest topic_id since that’s what the root tweet of a tree of replies becomes.  It would be nice to go back and stitch up all the previous replies-of-replies, but I would understand if the hit on the database would be too big.  How many tweets are in there anyway?

The Scream by Edvard Munch

I was lucky that last month’s XML Philly meeting didn’t trigger my post-traumatic stress syndrome. Quark’s presentation on their XML Author product took me back to the front lines, having done something similar with Word and SGML over a dozen years ago.  Quark says it always produces valid XML for any schema.  I can testify that it’s no small feat if true:  Although Word now produces XML directly, it’s a generic schema that represents formatting, not semantics.  Wasn’t this the schema Microsoft wanted to patent as a part of their contribution to “Open Standards”?  Anyway, this is still a hard problem with no obvious solution.

Their secret is that the plug-in completely replaces the implementation of the Word data model.  XML is always valid because users are always working in XML; there is no messy conversion between the flat, unstructured Word model and the deep, structured XML model.  What XML Author gets from Word is the familiar GUI and a clear list of features to support, like Track Changes.  In theory, this gets around several common XML acceptance problems:  Users don’t have to learn a new interface, and business owners don’t have to pay for two separate word processors on everybody’s desktop.

Both justifications fall apart under closer scrutiny. Authoring XML changes how users work due to structural requirements; in particular, cut-copy-paste between vanilla Word or different schemas requires skill and patience because of the always-on validation.  Although users won’t have extra icons on their desktops, the business will have to cough up significant licensing fees that will feel like having two separate, high-end products installed.  Quark was also pushing their professional services for getting things up and running–both an added cost and an indication that things aren’t as simple as they seem.

Then there’s the question that always comes up at these meetings:  What if you share XML documents with people outside your company? There might be something webbie in the future, but for now let’s not even go there.

We didn’t get a live demo of the product, and an acquaintance who evaluated it warns that it’s not ready for prime time if your business depends on complex XML or heavy-duty Word features.  I would also be wary of the product constantly lagging behind Word features because it is essentially a reverse-engineered product, and it’s an acquisition that Quark’s still trying to fit into its existing product line.  Still, it’s easier than trying to mimic, maintain, and synchronize XML structures in actual Word documents.  I have the scars to prove it.

One small consolation of my contract in Rockville is spending quality time with my iPod Touch, podcasts, and the Civic–who is now officially named “Blue Monday”.  Tonight’s drive was especially pleasant from both the driving and podcast listening perspectives.  Here are some highlights from the things I heard:

Beer-Drinking Tree Shrews

Oh, beer.  You are such a Good Thing that even evolution loves you.  A palm evolved natural fermentation chambers to capture yeast and brew you from its own nectar.  A species of beer-swilling shrew doesn’t seem to get drunk despite a hefty habit; I can’t decide if we should praise or pity the little fellow.  A species of loris has also developed a drinking habit, nothing nearly as nasty as their anorexic cousin’s habits who grace the cover of one of my favorite O’Reilly books.  Evolution, beer, UNIX, and primates behaving badly–fabulous!

Nail Your Files

Stever Robbins, the Get-It-Done guy over at quickanddirtytips.com has some helpful hints about a subject near and dear to my heart, file naming conventions.  He gets points for suggesting the ISO 8601 date to tell apart your 5,000 report.doc files and to sort them chronologically in your file manager of choice.  It’s sad that most people still live in a world where meaningful search or–dare I say it–real metadata doesn’t exist.  On a related note, I definitely have a few things to say about how much I’m using Spotlight in a subsequent post.

Outsmarting Bombers

This edition of the Scientific American’s weekly podcast podcast takes a fascinating look at counter-IED technology in Iraq and a related story about the continuing problems with turning the lights back on in Baghdad.  More robots controlled by the video-game generation combat an adaptable enemy turning our commodity tech against us.  Scary and fascinating.  Finally, our friend the beer-swilling Loris makes an appearance at the end of the podcast in the “Totally Bogus” segment.  Who knew I was embracing my Inner Chimp every time I popped the top off a bottle of Midas Touch? Mmm, beer.

Tell Me a Story

Finally, RadioLab has produced some of the best podcasts I’ve ever listened to.  It’s This American Life meets Nova, two things I already love.  In this between-seasons short, Robert Krulwich addresses Cal Tech graduates.  I won’t butcher it with a summary.  Just go listen to it right now.  Being a science reporter like Krulwich or Mursky (of SciAm) is my new dream job.  Subscribe to the podcast, go back through all the episodes–especially the ones or morality and emergence–and thank me later.

Libraries are moving online.  The Free Library of Philadelphia (FLP) is podcasting author events and provides all kinds of digital media downloads.  I was thinking about joining Audible.com, but now I’m having second thoughts.  Why buy books (or movies) online that I’ll only read once–if I finish them at all?

My sad little DVD library, about 40 discs in a black binder, gathers dust; I haven’t bought anything in years, and the whole HDDVD/Bluray brouhaha drove me further away from copy-protected physical media.  The only HD content ever played on my years-old HDTV came out of the DVI connector on my Powerbook.

I’m perfectly happy buying music from iTunes, Amazon, and Magnatune because I expect to reuse that media often.  An audio book, TV show, or movie download won’t have the same reuse value.  How many times will I really watch that BSG episode?  (Once is almost too much since the end of season two.)  I’m perfectly happy letting TiVo gather what I wan so I can delete it when I’m done.  It’s not that I don’t want to pay, but I’d feel obliged to keep what I buy.  There’s just not enough room on my hard drives or in my minimalist soul for all that kept-out-of-guilt content.

Renting movies and TV shows makes perfect sense, and I’m hoping AppleTV continues to grow.  They need to work out a few kinks first like longer replay time:  Who thinks 24 hours is enough time in a busy world?  Rent-to-buy might also entice me to spend a little more on those rare occasions when I actually want to own what I just saw.

DRM is a necessary evil for rentals.  I don’t like it on content I own, but it’s a reasonable way to simulate the rental store–or library–experience.  In the rental store model, the content provider gets a cut of each download.  That doesn’t work for libraries since there is no cost for downloads, so the trick is simulating the real-world limit of actual books on a shelf and library cards.

Each downloadable title on the FLP site has a “Copies Available” count.  The DRM on the download self-expires based on the standard schedule (e.g., 21 days for a book) and decrements the available count for that time.  (I don’t know if you can return something early and increment the count.) At first I cringed a little due to my “information wants to be free” impulse, but I’m growing comfortable with simulating real-world behavior to keep the content creators happy so free libraries fulfill their mission of content to all–just not all at once.

Some titles can be burned to CD while others cannot.  There might be public-domain works that have no DRM, but I haven’t found them yet.  I haven’t hacked around or done experiments since I don’t want to raise red flags, but I’ll have plenty of time driving back and forth to Rockville for audio content.  My podcast backlog should in fact disappear in late May given the five or six hour round-trip each week, so I’ll need more content.

Maybe FLP’s system has some hidden glitches; I can always bite the bullet and download read-once content from Audible.  Otherwise, that five-year-old library-geek inner child of mine will delight every time I drop by my branch library and check out a few books from anywhere in the world.

(UPDATED 2008-04-25 20:01)

One tiny hitch–FLP’s downloadable content uses Overdrive, and it only works on Windows machines.  For a few short moments I got to relive the joy and wonder of my childhood love affair with libraries.  Now I also get to relive the disappointment and disillusionment of puberty.   

It looks like it’s DRM features in WMA that aren’t supported on the Mac.  Other libraries use the same technology, so I hope I’m not the first to write in about it.  If you use a Mac, I’d suggest you find your local free library’s web site.  If they support downloadable content through Overdrive, politely suggest that they need to support everybody (i.e., Windows, Mac, and Linux).  If they provide Mac support, thank them and post the details here as a comment.

In either case, take this opportunity to support your free library with a donation.  It’s as pure a good deed as they come, it’s tax deductible, and your library-geek inner child will thank you.

I was just working through my podcast backlog and hit Apple Tip #44 which demonstrates using Spotlight for doing simple calculations and defining terms. Google’s been sneaking similar features into their basic and advanced search for years. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like command-line tools are making a slow, under-the-radar comeback.

As much as I love the Mac’s GUI, I’m a UNIX guy and just need a command line from time to time. GUIs are great for arbitrary selection, but command lines provide better related-set definition and complex processing via wildcards, regular expressions, and pipes. That was my initial attraction to Mac OS X–best of both worlds with a new GUI on top and BSD underneath.

I have to admit I don’t open terminals much lately: Bluehost‘s control panel and Coda let me handle routine web hosting activities, and I’m more likely to open Python than use bc to do simple math. There’s also Quicksilver, an interesting hybrid of keyboard control and graphical display worth investigating. Parsing a raw dump of my currently-subscribed podcasts still benefits from some sed/awk magic, but I’m getting comfortable enough with AppleScript to try that approach next time.

Neither GUIs nor command-line interfaces are silver bullets. Improvements in Spotlight and Automator are giving GUI users some of the capabilities that previously were only available to the UNIX-savvy. I can’t wait to see how these new hybrid tools evolve to give me new ways to look at and work with my computer. Must be my Perl heritage, that need for more than one way to do it.

He talks about how our increasingly short-sighted society is bankrupting our scientific future because they don’t get that it takes decades for basic research to mature into game-changing technologies. Companies only worried about their next quarter aren’t going to spend money on ideas that seem like science fiction now but will dominate the economy of the next generation. The Long Now Society has been sounding that alarm for a decade. Is anybody listening yet?

That’s why government funding of basic science is even more important now. But suppose our current (rapidly declining) economic and scientific world dominance rests on the laurels of research started in the sixties and seventies. The “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s kicked off America’s anti-science attitude. Republicans pandering to their religious fundamentalist base curtailed new vistas in science like stem cell research, but Bush’s broader defunding of basic science may relegate the country to scientific irrelevance in 20-30 years. Given how science begets economy begets political power in the post-WWII world, it’s not just scientific irrelevance we need to worry about.

Further Reading:

The Clock of the Long Now (book)

After four years consulting for a financial services company, I say regulation can’t come fast enough to investment banks, hedge funds, and private equity funds. They weren’t doing anything technically illegal, but they certainly were being too clever, too greedy, and too secretive. Now we’ve got some nose-on-your-face evidence with the mortgage meltdown and collapse of Bear Stearns that they need oversight. I invoke the Blade Runner Test:

Rachael: It seems you feel our work is not a benefit to the public.

Deckard: Replicants are like any other machine: they’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit, it’s not my problem.

The same is true of the byzantine instruments and predatory fee structures running rampant through the alternative investments space. The hazard comes in two forms:

(1) Institutional investors like pension funds are exposing their members to unacceptable risk. These individuals can’t invest directly in things like hedge funds because they aren’t qualified investors, a fancy way of saying “rich enough to lose a million dollars and not feel it”, but now they’re exposed indirectly with their very futures at stake.

(2) The financial system is a house of cards with players so heavily indebted to each other that one falling could topple the whole system. I don’t like what the Fed did, but they were dead-on about preventing a complete seizing-up of the financial industry–a substantial, growing part of our GNP as we forget how to produce real goods, services, and new ideas. The country as a whole would bear the brunt of the suffering–either via bailouts or a 21st century worldwide depression that might make the 20th century one seem mild.

What boggles my mind is how predictable this all was. The reasons why things are falling apart now are the same reasons we regulated banks and securities after the Great Depression. Besides regulating the existing instruments, I hope governments learn that they must regulate all new instruments at some minimal level to make sure Wall Street isn’t being too clever or cavalier. They also need to ratchet up the regulation whenever individuals are unaware they’re being exposed to risk via institutional investors like pension funds.