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.

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.

Marketplace Squeeze-Out

Remember Netscape? (You get bonus points and a free bottle of Geritol for you if you remember Mosaic.) They made a business out of a web browser, and that eggs-in-one-basket strategy certainly contributed to their decline.

Microsoft successfully drove Netscape out of business by including Internet Explorer with Windows for free. The first IE was horrible, but its icon was there on everybody’s desktop, begging to be clicked. Don’t underestimate the compulsion to click that shiny, candy-red button when it’s right in front of your face. People don’t wage years-long legal campaigns to remove desktop shortcuts out of a sense of aesthetics. IE improved with time, and consumers weren’t as quick to whip out their credit cards for Netscape. That hurt, but it was the loss of corporate sales that deprived the one-trick pony of its bread and butter.

IT professionals had a harder time arguing in jargon-free terms why management needed to pay for another program when there was something free on every machine they bought. The truth is, IE wasn’t free. Its direct cost was built into Windows and every PC where Microsoft’s other squeeze-out tactic was working brilliantly. Exclusive contracts with hardware manufacturers gave them an unassailable beachhead in the Browser Wars.

Every Windows user is still paying indirectly for IE: ActiveX was the cluster bomb that unpaved the way for our current security crisis, but it wasn’t the first time Microsoft compromised a product’s integrity for a short-term win. Other IT dinosaurs may remember the stability hit NT 4 took because Microsoft pushed the graphics handling up the stack and allowed it memory-protection-free access to the executive layer. I hate performance shortcuts that diminish a system’s stability or integrity.

The strategy worked; Microsoft won the Browser Wars, and it took the industry almost a decade to climb back out of that hole. Thanks largely to Firefox and Safari, browsing the web is evolving again. I’m personally enthralled by Safari 3′s ability to move tabs around within and between Windows. Hmm, I suppose I don’t mind the monopolies that give me the best product, hence my love-hate affair with Apple.

Hearts and Minds, Bait and Switch

Would it surprise you to know that Microsoft promised a full XML-based format for Office documents back in 1997? It surprised me when I attended an XML conference in Seattle. I also got to meet Larry Wall, eat expensive sushi on the IE product manager’s tab, and met a good friend that indoctrinated me into the ways of perl mongery, beer, and the Philly food scene. There was also a second incident with fried shrimp heads, but that’s better not mentioned in polite company.

The ongoing controversy about ODF is the last act of a decade-long attempt my Microsoft to coerce an open standard to their own ends. They’ve done it with other things, but never before with the quiet persistence of wrestling XML away from an open standard and into another proprietary format for holding people’s documents ransom. Oh, and don’t you think Adobe’s not doing the same right now, but they’re a lower-case evil compared to Microsoft’s all-in-caps EVIL.

Their strategy wasn’t unlike the grassroots Christian Fundamentalist takeover of the US government in the 70s and 80s. Instead of school boards, Microsoft seeded open standards committees with their people. I won’t say these people were active agents of evil; some seemed truly interested in doing the right thing in the free-as-beer sense. Maybe a few of them were sleeper agents waiting to go off, but others were just good people that would eventually get squeezed between their two masters, the open ideal and their leash holder.

Microsoft’s first few attempts to generate XML (and even HTML) from Office documents were, well, horrible. It was a half-dozen years before Office 2003 could generate something better than a well-formed mess with more tagging and attributes than content. I’d already developed a system that converted Word documents into rich SGML for SB, so I know that it’s a difficult but solvable problem. My talents aside, it’s hard to believe that however-many Office programmers working within Word’s source couldn’t accomplish in six years what took me about one. Clearly there was a lack of motivation on somebody’s part to solve the problem well.

The markup and codes in Word are all presentation focused and lack any sense of context beyond range, paragraph, and document. A useful (SG|X)ML document has a structure, expressed as a DTD or XML Schema, and depends heavily on context–especially for output specifications, expressed as CSS, FOSI, XSL/T, etcetera. Supporting this complexity would require a fundamentally different Word. That would have a leveling effect since the first few versions would lack features, have bugs, and have to play catchup to some of the better structured document editors of the day. Before even being EVIL, there’s a self-preservation issue here.

Thing is, Microsoft only appeared to plod forward clumsily toward the promised XML-native office formats. They had a two-pronged attack on the open standard. The first prong was the format bait-and-switch that worked so well in the Browser War: Embrace the standard, then start saturating it with custom features to support functionality only found in Microsoft products. This didn’t surprise anybody. What surprised me was the second prong, a legal maneuver claiming copyrights on the schemas that define the “open format” documents to effectively ban compatibility in competing products like OpenOffice.

With everybody more concerned about web pages and records management lately, I haven’t been paying as much attention over the last few years. A recent Ars Technica article [Analyst Group Slams ODF, Downplays Microsoft ISO Abuses] includes the whole cast in media res. What I thought was the last act was just the end of the first part of a trilogy with part two titled “The Two Formats”. I also saw something about Microsoft trying to create a PDF competitor; I might actually pop some popcorn and plop down on the couch to watch that one unfold. It sounds like King Kong Versus Godzilla!

Free Now, Not So Much Later

The common thread here is that what’s free now can cost you later. When the free beer is flowing, make sure you either keep your wits about you or have some good friends watching your back or taking your keys. Otherwise you may wake up in an alley with your pants down around your ankles and a big Windows logo tattooed on your ass.