It's conventional wisdom that you don't reply to a smaller competitor's taunts, that it empowers and publicizes them in ways that only benefit them. Not saying Oracle's the smaller company, but WebCenter < Documentum WRT market share I'm guessing. How well did that strategy work for Microsoft ignoring those Apple "I'm a Mac" ads for so long? Yah. Hmm, so much for "conventional" wisdom.

In the consumer market, the same person chooses, pays for, and uses the product. It goes beyond delight; a successful product makes the user wonder, "How did I ever live without this?" Large IT projects rarely have the same people choosing technologies, paying for resources (like me), and using resulting products. Project goals are often at odds with making something people would want to use, being more about cost-cutting, compliance, or other factors that make use mandatory. A good user experience takes a back seat to such business drivers when choice, payment, and use are split among different people with different (sometimes bonus-related) objectives and levels of organizational clout. Access to tools like Google Docs, Flickr, and Box.net for their personal computing needs have raises users' expectations around collaboration and content management. It's not always a fair comparison, but it's enough to make pitchforks and torches a reality for projects that continue to pay no heed to usability.

The ID thing is a clear result of the user-oriented SharePoint philosophy versus the Developer-oriented philosophy that was Documentum in its first few years. I would hope that SP2010 allows for addressing by a compound key of ID and version. Is SP version still just an integer and a linear sequence? Anyway, I would actually prefer the compound key approach since the idea of "each version is a document and has its own ID" is something casual Documentum users and developers struggle with. Hmm, default bind-to-current with optional custom bind rule as a property of the document would be a neat little innovation.

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 this episode or RadioLab: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/09/25 I am not exactly known to be an optimist.

I wouldn't wait too long to see what senior management does; they have easier outs if something bad happens. It's like you're on a ship, there's an iceberg dead ahead, and you don't have a life jacket. You can either wait to see what the people with life jackets do, or you can go get a life jacket of your own ...