In Different ways Hewlett-Packard and Autonomy were once idolise d: hp as the mother company of Silicon Valley, founded in a Palo Alto garage in 1939; Autonomy as the bright young thing of the British tech scene. Not now. One boss after another has struggled to restore hp's past glory. Autonomy started to lose its sheen the moment hp agreed to buy it for $10.3 billion in 2011. Some analysts wondered whether hp, then the world's largest computer-maker, was paying too much for Autonomy, a software firm that specialised in analysing "unstructured" data (ie, not in neat databases). The marriage was rocky from the start.
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