When a farmer goes to town
According to other reports, Mike Lynch indicated that after the acquisition, HP sacked the top 100 staff at Autonomy. I lived through 2 HP acquisitions of the companies I worked for and I can attest to their zeal in driving the post-acquisition costs down. In this case, a company dealing in sophisticated software solutions was bought by a company that basically lives off printer ink and laser printer fillings. No wonder they could not grasp the fact that it takes a little more to produce and sell the Autonomy solutions than their commercial acumen (knowing how much to give and to whom) and primitive mathematics.