In 2011 HP paid $12B for his company and then claimed it wasn't worth that much, their write-down suggested they thought it was actually worth $4B.
Wikipedia says Autonomy's tech was "[a] variety of enterprise search and knowledge management applications using adaptive pattern recognition techniques centered on Bayesian inference in conjunction with traditional methods"
It sounds pretty niche for a company that isn't already big in search. Has anyone read what HP thought it could do with the tech to get a return ? I feel like there must have been some need that HP had which I'm unware of.
I do appreciate that the reasons large corps do acquisitions, and how, are not always susceptible to reason but Oracle's market cap at the start of 2011 was $160B. What could have made Autonomy worth 7.5% of Oracle to HP ?
Pretty sure that "Bayesian inference" is precursor to predictive analytics, machine learning, and AI. So basically, they were selling a search service which could anticipate the user's requests or produce contextual results (whether it actually worked well or not, I have no idea). But recognizing how highly the market values AI companies and products today, you can understand why HP might pay a premium back then.
(projector screen in the business room buzzing as it slowly rolls down as some manager from HP proudly wraps up his warm-up speech)
"... and so without further ado: our next revolution in printing, super-resolution printing"
(luscious female voice sounds through the high-end HP-desktop speakers nearby)
"Imagine a printer that prints documents sharper than the digital file you fed it!"
(an overacting commercial of a person walking to the office copy machine with a blurry copy of Implementing Automatic Differentiation Efficiently by Juedes and Griewank https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1207975/m2/... he scans his poor copy-of-a-copy to make yet another copy "only twice removed")
"can someone help me copy this decently?" the actor asks out loud, "the output page is worse than the already bad input page"
another overacting "colleague" walks over to the HP copy machine, a close up of the buttons is shown
"just press 'HP sharp copy' " as the camera scrolls a little more to the right, revealing a big green button boasting a logo of a monk copying manuscripts with a razor blade
Out comes a pixel perfect replica of the original document, sharper than the copy it had received.
(end of sales pitch demonstration video)
"Great Idea! But how will we make it?" the vice president asks
The manager behind the promotional video says
"Well I've got bad news and I've got good news, I will start with the good news: we believe Lynch can do it for us"
"Great, so then whats the problem, lets buy him" the vice president said.
"Well here comes the bad news, he doesn't want to work for us, but he's willing to sell us his company"
"Great, so how much is it worth, and how much is he asking?"
"Well, we believe we will drive out all competition with HP-super-resolution-printing, both from files as well as physical documents, so to us it's worth twice our current value of HP combined, at least" says the manager
"Oh thats bad news indeed", says the VP
"but perhaps we can play hard-to-get and only offer him $4B, if he doesn't fall for that we offer him $12B"
An engineer chokes in his coffee, "$12B?"
He stutters something like "I would probably first correct any slant, by looking at the fourier transform, or perhaps cylinder fitting, but to remove the variance on all the characters we could first classify all the characters, then overlay all the A's and sum or average them, the same with all the B's etc... and then"
The VP and the manager simultaneously say "Bob, you're fired, you should know by now when you are supposed to shut and and when you are supposed to talk"
>On 18 August 2011, Hewlett-Packard announced that it would purchase Autonomy for US$42.11 per share with a premium of around 79% over market price that was widely criticized as "absurdly high"...
In 2011 HP paid $12B for his company and then claimed it wasn't worth that much, their write-down suggested they thought it was actually worth $4B.
Wikipedia says Autonomy's tech was "[a] variety of enterprise search and knowledge management applications using adaptive pattern recognition techniques centered on Bayesian inference in conjunction with traditional methods"
It sounds pretty niche for a company that isn't already big in search. Has anyone read what HP thought it could do with the tech to get a return ? I feel like there must have been some need that HP had which I'm unware of.
I do appreciate that the reasons large corps do acquisitions, and how, are not always susceptible to reason but Oracle's market cap at the start of 2011 was $160B. What could have made Autonomy worth 7.5% of Oracle to HP ?