Here are my thoughts on Brilliant Leap’s latest post about EMC dropping Web Content Manager [Brilliant Leap: Na na na na, Hey hey-ey Goodbye].

I remember when Documentum turned its back on their Big Pharma customers to chase the web content management dream during the tech bubble. So now they’re backing away from WCM after dropping DSM? Hmm. Then there’s EMC’s “we’re not worthy” submissive stance regarding Sharepoint. Hmm.

Will users five years from now actually know what Documentum is? EMC will have to wage a “Documentum Inside” campaign like Intel’s to keep any kind of mind share with customers. They still have Captiva, but does anybody really want to be *known* for scanning, the lowest form of document management?

An optimist would claim that they’re focusing on core technologies, and we’ll see long-needed improvements at the server and in the data model. A pessimist would argue this is another sign of EMC parasitizing Documentum. Think “zombie wasp” from the RadioLab episode on Parasites.

I am not exactly known for being an optimist, but this may be good news for alternatives like Drupal and Alfresco as businesses starting reaching for a can of Raid.

At home, I only use Windows on my gaming machine. XP after all these years is running (mostly) smoothly and quickly. The newest game I’m running said yesterday that Win7 is not officially supported despite the developer having a very close relationship with Microsoft. Games are particularly sensitive to change, especially in graphics drivers, audio drivers, and memory management. There’s no benefit under Win7 with any of the games I play (e.g., no DirectX 10 games), only risk.

My current client is still on Windows XP. While I expect they will move to Windows 7 eventually, it won’t be anytime soon: The upgrade inertia of a company with tens of thousands of computers, many of which don’t have the horsepower to make Win7 a good experience, is a frightening thing to behold. Especially if you make your living by selling shrink-wrapped upgrades to companies like them.

Win7 is in a bind; Vista’s problems weren’t entirely technical and may reflect the mature nature of the computer market more than mistakes made at the software level. People upgrade Windows when they buy new computers, not to get new features. The economic downturn means fewer computer sales. Some analysts think Win7 will drive more hardware sales,but that’s a cart-before-the-horse argument to me.

People use applications, not hardware or operating systems. Until those applications require new hardware or Win7, people won’t upgrade. It’s cost without benefit. Microsoft is trying to include useful software with Win7, something they (sometimes unfairly) get into trouble for, but people with Windows right now already have 3rd party software for those things. While I’ve come to doubt that people are rational actors in the economic sense, the cost/benefit equation is just too obvious here, especially when money is tight.

On my Mac, I upgrade more frequently because Apple provides functional improvements to applications I use in daily life as well as new/cool stuff.  There are more applications shipped with the OS that I use regularly, so I am more interested in what an OS upgrade includes. It also helps that Mac OS X upgrades are more frequent and lower impact. Although I’ve wanted to do a clean install, I haven’t *had* to do one and therefore haven’t done it.

27 inches of Sexy

The most likely thing to get me to buy Win7 right now is if I get one of the new iMacs to act as both gaming and desktop computer. 27 inches, video in, and nice horsepower in the CPU/GPU on the high end have me interested. And it’s lickably sexy. My gaming rig is a few years old (another reason I’m hesitant to push it to Win7 even though I have a Gig of memory XP can’t address) but a new iMac would have plenty of cycles to spare for Win7.

Microsoft sticking to a release date is nice to see, but it’s not without risk. My final hesitation (on almost any 1.0 product) is how rushed it was to get out the door on time. How far into the future is SP1 going to be?

For no real benefit, Win7 would only bring me risk and cost, so I don’t do Windows upgrades–for now.

Google Docs Adds Shared Folders — Mashable.com

Mashable claims that Google’s new shared folders work just like they should. I beg to differ. Google doesn’t really have folders under the hood, just like some other document management system I used to talk about. Things get tricky when a document can be in more than one place. Google’s full of smart people, so I decided to hope for the best and kick the tires: Create a few folders, create a few documents, and then permission and move things around to see what happens.

The first no-big-surprise was Google Docs has trouble with state. Web applications are still inferior to stand-alone clients (or operating systems) when managing state. Most of the time a refresh would solve the inconsistencies around location or permissions, but sometimes a logout/login was needed. State issues aside, let’s look at the behavior.

Google walks a tightrope with its “folders” because they really aren’t folders; they’re tags. The behavior you get depends on the context: If you’re in a folder, you get the “move” menu item which works as advertised; something is in one place, then it’s in another–or nowhere since documents don’t have to be in folders. Use the folders menu item and you get the “tag” behavior because you’re directly selecting zero or more items from a taxonomy of tags that happen to have folder icons next to them.

Hacking around, I discovered that Google’s “how it should work” is a most permissive model; it seems to just gather the list of every sharing option on the shared folders. This isn’t horrible; however, the metaphorical mismatch it creates will undoubtedly cross the line into “too permissive”. Most people will assume that the permissions on the “last” folder they put something into will determine the permissions. To Google’s credit, they display a permissions summary next to each document. Maybe that’s good enough to prevent mistakes. And maybe everybody reads EULAs before clicking “I agree”, too.

The shame here is that Google really broke ground with ideas like conversations in GMail. Seeing your replies in the thread of a conversation is obviously the right thing to do; segregating part of the conversation to the Sent “folder” is a broken model that requires people to quote the entire previous conversation with each response. Horrible! Google’s always on the verge of freeing people from the tyranny of folders but never fully commits to a pure tag and search approach, so they won’t be overthrowing The Folder Hierarchy with this feature.

    Happy Birthday Chuck! You’ve given us so much!

Last night’s Philadelphia XML Users Group was a pleasant mix of the old and the new: Jim Caine of Jaquette Consulting revisited an earlier talk on content reuse that touched on DITA and Documentum among other things.

Named for today’s birthday boy, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is a simple XML application (in the xml sense) that models information around authoring units like topics and references instead of publishing like documents and books.  It’s meant to be extensible (in the OO sense) rather than definitive.  Somehow DITA never crossed my path until a few months ago, but it represents another step towards the Grail of structured authoring/publishing that I worked on 15 years ago.

Jim’s project involved moving an insurance institute’s learning resources into a single repository and allowing them to create a variety of products (real books, eLearning, flash cards, etc.) from the same content.  The project started last year; Jim first presented on the project back then and gave the group a look at how practice deviated from theory.  He did some really smart things to facilitate reuse like referencing XML wrappers for external entities like images. This allows reuse of data and the metadata.  Kudos to WordPress for a similar albeit not XML approach to images and galleries. I’ll post a link to his presentation when it hits the web.

Turns out that authoring structured content is still the hard part.  The original plan involved a Word plug-in to allow authors to create valid structured content at the very beginning.  This good idea hit some bumps because of vendor support issues and was the hardest conceptual change to make in the whole process.  Authors used to writing a single document now wrote up to a dozen separate learning objects, a subtype of topic.  Deja vu all over again.

A very few actors in the content creation process have a very lively editorial cycle.  We’re talking major rewrites, not “you missed a comma here” kinds of things.   This wasn’t a problem back on RDMS: We dealt more with multiple authors and a review process than the more traditional author/editor interaction going on here.  Even in legal review and approval, I’m used to all actors being subject matter experts, often getting more experty the further along in the lifecycle you go.  Not so in this case–and publishing in general I’d guess.

Here comes more deja-vu-all-over-again:  The plugin couldn’t handle the actors’ heavy dependence on Word collaboration features like Track Changes.  It’s easy to get lulled into a false sense of security by an oh-so-pretty model for the final product of the authoring process. That Emerald City architectural view of content hides all the information and processing necessary to get to that end.  This particular problem has sparked some heavy flirtation between authoring, wikis, and DITA happening in my head, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Jim’s use of XML Applications (in the Documentum sense) worked well with DITA’s topics and maps.  No big surprise there, but the marriage of DITA maps and Documentum virtual documents came with the usual toilet-seat-down relationship problems, especially because of webtop’s weak handling of virtual documents.  A post-editorial staff using XMetaL bears the brunt of the bickering, so authors are  left to worry about intellectual property, not scaffolding, as it should be.

Most of my work lately has centered on document dumping grounds.  Records management, eDiscovery, and transactional content management don’t concern themselves with the processes of actually making content.  It was great to see what’s happening on the other side again, and I’ve been stupid for not attending this group sooner.  Such is the life of a freelance.

One special note: The Users Group had brownies for Valentine’s Day.  Mmm, tasty!  I suggested that publicizing food at meetings might be some great marketing.  It might also require a bigger conference room for several reasons!

FINRA is the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the United States. We oversee nearly 5,000 brokerage firms, 172,000 branch offices and 665,000 registered securities representatives. Our chief role is to protect investors by maintaining the fairness of the U.S. capital markets. — finra.org Homepage

This is good news to me, just like Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu’s appointment to head the Energy Department.  Shapiro promises to be a tough enforcer, something sorely lacking these last eight years.  I’d happily authorize her to use water boarding and extraordinary rendition on these billionaire market fundamentalists whose financial terrorism has left the entire world in chaos.

This may also be good news for FINRA.  I sincerely hope there’s a broader role  for them in the post-market-fundamentalism finance ecology, regulating a broader range of investments and having a bigger stick by forwarding cases to a more aggressive SEC.  They should also get some of the funds being flung around to expand their capabilities.  That’s a better investment than dropping $25 billion on Bank of America, no questions asked.

Ballmer and Tucci?

For those living under a rock …

BrilliantLeap – EMC Layoffs: Is there really no better alternative?

It’s hard to say what layoffs at EMC mean for Documentum.  Where does EMC expect the greatest shrink in revenue: hardware or software?  The lion’s share of their business is still disk, but  I can come up with arguments both ways.  That won’t matter if the process is politically driven which would be bad for smaller, acquired former-companies like Documentum.

Here’s a horrible thought: Another way to improve the bottom line is to sell off assets.  Maybe we’ll finally see Documentum end up in the hands of Microsoft, a player that still has plenty of cash and a hunger for acquisitions.  EMC is big enough and the economy bad enough that I don’t see Microsoft going all boa constrictor and swallowing it whole, but it’s a strange time. Just rumor-mongering here, mind you.

Optimists out there might imagine EMC being inspired by Jason Calacanis and his well-reasoned preemptive layoffs at Mahalo.  It’s superficially apples and oranges, comparing a large public company to a small startup, but everybody needs vision and adaptability to survive the next 2-3 years.  Calacanis makes a solid case for his layoffs in “How to Handle Layoffs” by explaining it in terms of managing burn rate and building the core product.  Will EMC give us a similarly candid rationale?

OT: Aside from shrewd business advice, Calacanis often does a fabulous impression of John C. Dvorak on This Week in Tech.

A company that flails around to meet arbitrary expectations set by a market of speculators (instead of actual investors–a vanishing breed) is going to fail in these tough times.  Will EMC be another casualty of a knee-jerk response to the Market Fundamentalism at the heart of the current crisis?

My Personal Favorite from DFH

A Perl Mongers tradition is that beer is never off-topic, but here’s a case where sudsy pleasure and geeky relevance collide.  I subscribe to Beer Advocate’s RSS feed and came across a particularly useful post:

Dogfish Head 2009 Beer Release Schedule – BeerAdvocate

Dogfish Head is a great craft brewer, and their brewpub in Gaithersburg is something I miss about working in Rockville, MD. Philly Beer Week (soon, soon) is the only time I’m tied into the beer scene enough to get news like this directly.  That’s why feeds from places like Beer Advocate and Joe Six Pack are so useful; the news comes to me rather than me having to go out and get it.  I hope DFH will follow my suggestion and publish their site’s news items as a feed, including posts about the schedule and as each beer becomes available.

UPDATE: Mariah from Dogfish tells me that RSS is already in the works. Please follow them on Twitter at dogfishbeer.  Also note that Twitter and RSS have common benefits and potential synergies to be discussed later.

I’m always championing RSS as TiVo for the Internet.  Living without RSS now is as unthinkable as no cash machines or using a regular mobile phone.  Go to one place (Google Reader for me because it spans all of my devices) and everything is there waiting for me.  Think of it as a custom-built newspaper if you’re so Luddite that you’re wondering what TiVo is.

The core idea here is familiar to OOP geeks:  The Observer Pattern.  It defines “a one-to-many dependency between objects so that when one object changes state, all its dependents are notified and updated automatically” (Design Patterns, Gof4).  While RSS mechanics are a little different than the traditional implementation of the pattern, the intent is the same:  One things changes, and many (only the interested, not necessarily all) know about it.

Companies can use RSS to deal with communication issues like email overload and collaboration site proliferation.  This isn’t a silver bullet to replace these technologies, but it can tame otherwise unruly beasts.  In subsequent posts I’m going to talk about using RSS as publisher, as subscriber, and then dive deeper into how RSS can make for a better communication architecture.

Putting aside enough time to honor your New Year’s resolutions?  A good extra New Year’s resolution might be to avoid everything on this list from ReadWriteWeb:

10 Mobile Social Networks to Check Out – ReadWriteWeb 

The prevailing wisdom (Folklore?) is that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the nodes: See Metcalfe’s law and the less-familiar, more optimistic Reed’s law.  That might be true of the potential of the entire network, but what about the value to a particular node, i.e., individual?  Mobile networks being geocentric will have much-smaller pockets of useful nodes due to population density and market popularity–think Orkut in Brazil.

They’re all competing for the same thing–my time–with often-redundant features.  Cross-posts helps: This blog goes to Linkedin and Twitter; Twitter, Facebook, and Brightkite cross-post to each other.  However, I often ignore cool features to cater to the least common denominator among my network of networks. There’s also the occasional SNAFU like when a blog bulk edit pushes dozens of bad posts to each.  Diminishing returns rapidly give way to value lost with too many active networks, cross-posting or not.

Right now we’re in the Cambrian Explosion of social networking; such booms rarely end well for the participants.  How many of ReadWriteWeb’s 10 will only be remembered in the fossil record of such articles?

Let’s deal with the underlying issue here:  The ESF article is talking about the other 99% of EMC that bought Documentum to sell disk.  EMC friends, I’m just kidding!  I can joke, right?  Since storage is not my expertise beyond some hacking around with Centera as primary content stores, I suppose EMC might really knock their customers’ socks off in the storage arena, but I doubt it.

Network disk isn’t something you see until it isn’t there, just like any good support technology.  It’s not sexy.  Apple’s products are shameless show-boaters meant to hog the spotlight.  They are meant to be seen, to be touched, and–dare I admit–even licked. Maybe that’s not a recommended way to unlock an iPhone, but what else can you do about winter, thick gloves, and a touch screen?

Would the average EMC storage user know the EMC logo on sight?  Would the average Apple user?

OK, so the EMC logo actually says “EMC” in it.  You get the point though, right?

Enderle’s article talks about quality, metrics, and customer loyalty.  All those things are important to Apple, although the often-excellent quality of Apple products is marred on a regular basis with things like incendiary power supplies and the worst product launch ever: iPhone 3G + MobileMe.  WORST!  LAUNCH!  EVER!

Only Starbucks matches Apple’s skill at selling Lifestyle. The synergy of Apple’s well-designed, well-integrated components had this caged bird singing gaily a few posts ago despite a healthy fear of monoculture coming from a science background.  That all misses the point, the one reason the whole discussion is apples and oranges:  Innovation.

Apple sets the bar for technology after technology:  operating systems, mp3 players, online music retailing, and of course smart phones.  The integration, the cool, the marketing are all icing on the cake because Apple does something better than anybody else:  They innovate, and they do it where they can define the market rather than chase it.

I don’t think Big Disk lives or dies on such radical innovation. In fact, their customers probably fear change more than most.  Change is not good for 24/7 availability.  I can hear the compliance officers, archivists, and system admins shrieking in terror at the thought of something that might as likely store their entire repositories on a postage stamp or burst into flames if looked at the wrong way.

There is a relentless integrity of concept, simplicity, and message spanning all Apple products that likely has a single source, Steve Jobs.  Such single-mindedness is what makes big, ambitious, risky, not-for-the-faint-of-heart products succeed or fail spectacularly.  Apple’s done both regularly.  It allows org-wide turn-on-a-dime changes, something that another industry titan *cough*Bill Gates*cough* executed brilliantly after completely missing the Internet as the Next Big Thing.

That conceptual integrity, that vision from the top is also why Apple clung to its single-button mouse a decade too long and why the iPod Touch and iThingThatWillNotBeNamed are missing the aesthetically unpleasing extra two or three buttons needed for touch-without-sight operation.  Because that’s how Steve Jobs sees it, end of story.

I’m sure Joe could give Steve a few helpful hints on running disk farms for MobileMe or handling eDiscovery for the next options scandal, but that’s not the point.  It’s what Jobs teaches his successor and if that successor has the Right Stuff to wield Apple as a single instrument of innovation, lest Apple repeat the recent catastrophes of their rivals to the North.

I have some long-time draft Documentum posts that should see daylight soon as well, and the new smart container feature in D6.5 has me pondering the fate of virtual documents and EMC’s folder fetish. Thanks to Brilliant Leap for sending me the link and distracting me from iPhone adoration for a few minutes.

Finally, kudos to the makers of WordPress 2.7.  Constant interface changes make me a little crazy (glares at Lotus Notes), but this truly was a big step forward for the project.  I’m looking forward to what they do in 2009.