Hi,

At 02:34 PM 9/11/00, Gavin Scott wrote:

>The Al Franken thing was mostly a waste of time (and a real waste of money
>IMHO).  The talk was occasionally humorous (if you're a Democrat and agree
>with Al's thesis that no Democrat ever made a mistake and that every
>Republican is an idiot).  I don't think I've ever heard a more one-sided
>(and mostly "serious" as opposed to "entertaining") political sales pitch.
>I think it was when Mr. Franken actually managed to defend Al Gore's claim
>of having "invented the Internet" that he lost a lot of the audience :-)

I agree with Gavin.  Moreso, I hope we never again have someone like Al
Franken at an HP World event.  I'm almost surprised that the FCC didn't get
hold of us today to require equal time to a Republican of equal balance,
say, Newt Gingrich.  :-)



>I thought I detected a faint air of annoyance ("you're making me re-record
>this whole speech just to include an MPE reference?") in Carly's demeanor,
>but it was probably my imagination :-)

Probably... :-)  Seriously, I was very happy to hear Carly speak to the
history and future of the 3000 at  the earliest part of her speech.  Don't
let anybody tell you that 1) your emails don't matter, and 2) that Carly
hasn't read them!  Though it's nice to hear these things, I'm going to
withhold my enthusiasm until I see the "rubber meet the road" from senior
HP management over the next several months.



>The management roundtable starts in five minutes, but I don't know *any* of
>the people on the panel, and I doubt that any of them would know much about
>the 3000, so I'll probably pass.  The people on the recent Management
>Roundtables have seemed totally disconnected from reality.  What we need is
>a separate CSY Management Roundtable containing the people who used to be
>on the "big" management roundtable.

I did go the the HP Management Roundtable and was surprised that the number
of references to MPE, though the attendance was abyssmally low (probably
due to the 12 (!) competing sessions).  The moderator kept a pretty good
flow and wasn't afraid to confront less than fully revealing answers.  It
was a fairly dry time (in fact, my ten-year-old son slept soundly through
about half of it!!) but it was worth going to.  One of the things that
happened is that the moderator (whose name escapes me now) is a Gartner
Group analyst who has agreed to take specific MPE concerns and put them
into either a "finding" of some kind (assumably to deliver to senior HP
management) or a letter direct to Carly.  He received a significant amount
of off-line responses to his request for more information as to what
specific complaints we might have.

We have the MPE Roundtable on Wednesday at 4:00 to 6:00 p.m.  The panelists
are:  Winston Prather, Dave Wilde, Christine Martino, Dave Snow, Kriss
Rant, and Dave Duplantier.  This isn't exactly what Gavin wants but it is
the best we can do for this year.  We can see about having more senior
management on the HP 3000 Management Roundtable at HP World in Chicago next
year.


>The vendor show is huge (and very noisy in some areas, but the noisy monster
>booths seem to be located next to (and thus competing in volume with) each
>other).  Either I'm getting shorter or the booths are getting taller.


The noise is pretty high but to Stan's liking I haven't seen anyone smoking
in the vendor area last year, unlike many years previously.  Plus the
vendor goodies are pretty good!

Later,

Bill