They positioned themselves like the Yin and Yang of our industry. While Restrac was an ad-hoc, query driven database, Resumix was a preplanning intensive search technology. The Resumix view of the world was built on 'structured lexicons', tables of relationships between words that helped the computer understand the 'meaning' of a resume.

Given the waves of change over the years, it's hard to remember just how powerful Resumix was.

It was simpler then. Instead of the broad menu of choices we have today and the sense that one or two of them are an experiment by the chef, the market had two choices. Either you were a pre-planning company that invested in upfront consulting or you were an ad-hoc company that invested in long term operational consulting. The bill was more or less the same, the approaches light years apart.

In the dot com flurry, both companies made the same critical sequential mistakes.

As it always happened (and as it will happen again), technology went through two major shifts during the evolution of the market. In the late eighties and very early nineties, corporate computing shifted from mainframes with servers to client-server. This was step one in the encroachment of personal computers on the mainframe IT Department.

Both Restrac and Resumix stumbled. The .0 releases of their newly integrated technology failed miserably, were hard to adopt and threatened the companies' livelihoods. The damage done to customers and customer relations can not be overstated. While they were busy fixing the problem, the tech stuff shifted again as the web emerged. All of a sudden there were real competitors. The two market leaders fell behind (at least in the development of new business).

Both companies survive today. With relatively large customer bases and the retained ability to fight erosion, they are sturdy, weathered enterprises with the sorts of character you'd expect from war veterans. They are generally quieter and content to grow at organic rates, given the lessons of the past five years.

Today, Resumix announced "immediate availability of its flagship Hiring Gateway platform." It's somehow based on Yahoo technology and somehow leverages that to do stuff. It's a little hard to understand how Yahoo (you look stuff up there) translates exactly into Recruiting, but we're open to the idea. The market could use a strongly positioned alternative.

It was like reading about the second marriage of an old college chum. We remember the young and earnest revolutionary who was going to change the world with 'structured lexicons' and a vision of organizations that all took planning seriously. What made Resumix great in the first place was the fact that it was a 'change the world' operation at its core.

We'll take it as a sign that the market is coming back. We wish them success.