Just remember....there *is* life after HP!

Bill,

I can't believe you're making this jump....but I assure you that you will be very happy with the results! I know it was a heart-wrenching decision to make, and that you have to have a bit of faith that "what will come" is going to be a positive experience. I'm sure it will be.

What I remember, and cherish, about Bill was his (as we called it) maniacal focus on end-user experience. Back in the early days of the web (circa 1995), Bill was always looking for the better ways to enable our salesforce to more easily locate relevant, useful information to help them sell more effectively. That's what all those revs of ESP (version 2.2, 2.4, and the never-saw-the-light-of-day version 3.0) were all about. I think that focus was one of the main reasons ESP was so successful throughout it's long life.

I joined the ESP team in 1995, coming from the field, and recruited by Russell and Steve to join the team. Shortly after I got there, Russell bailed and I kind-of, sort-of inherited a lot of the ESP stuff. Those years, from about 1995 to about 2000 were one of the highlights of my years at HP. It was a wonderful group of people, dedicated to their task of making ESP the best it could be.

And Bill contributed mightily to that task. He was the fastest prototyper I knew. You could muse one morning "I wonder what it would look like if we did this....", and that afternoon, Bill would say "take a look at this...". But, even better, he was always open to new ideas, suggestions on ways to make things better, and never got caught up in an unwillingness to change.

As I think about those years, here's some of the things that pop into my mind:

• Those long, involved, design meeting to define what ESP 2.4 was going to be. The major jump for 2.4 (if I remember correctly) was that it was going to integrate Computer News Online directly into the application. We had to not only figure out how to improve the "basic" ESP, but also had to design and implement an online publishing and archiving policy that would allow us to maintain CNO.
  
• Moving the ESP server out of a closet and into a real, live datacenter. The mark of a REAL application!
• Moving that same server (or was it a newer one by then?) from Cupertino to Colorado over a weekend. What we did to make sure the salesforce wouldn't be without their ESP!
• Those long, interesting meetings with Steven and Ken from Sierra Vista Research designing the next generation ESP, aka ESP 3.0. I found out more about ontologies and taxonomies that I ever thought I wanted to know!
  
• Going through the agony of stopping development of ESP 2.4 in favor of rolling out ESP 3.0 through ShortCycles....only to see ShortCycles go belly up in the dot-com bust in about 2000. We got cool T-shirts, though...
  
• THEN...trying to kick start ESP 2.4 development, while deciding what to do for the next gen system, which ended up as Project Phoenix (get it? Rising from the ashes?) in 2001.
  
• THEN...having Carly decide to merge with Compaq in late 2001, and putting Phoenix into an unknown state.
• THEN...merging with Compaq in 2002 and reorganizing and splitting up the ESP team for "efficiency and accountability".
  
• THEN...breaking us, and ESP, up even further with The Source, and the eventual death of ESP

So, enough musing about the past. It was a great time; one of the best for me in 29 years at HP.

Good luck in your new adventures...and keep in touch.

All the best,
Bob