* Posts by Adele McInley

1 publicly visible post • joined 23 Aug 2024

UK tech pioneer Mike Lynch dead at 59

Adele McInley

Re: Is or Was Autonomy any good?

I worked for Autonomy for a while in the early 2000s. The core search was good - streets ahead of its competitors at the time, though by the early 2010s I found that others like SOLR and Elastic had exceeded it. I doubt many enterprises are still using it, and if they are then I'd guess only as a vertical search (i.e. a single data store) rather than true enterprise search. Like all enterprise search products, it was hard to configure well, so unless the purchaser had a dedicated search team, and most didn't (and still don't), then it underwhelmed the end user.

Autonomy seemed well set up. There were the founders and C-suite, who were generally mid-30s at the time, and then the best uni-leavers they could hire, all in our early 20s. It is still the highest concentration of extremely talented people of any place I've ever worked at. I was neither dedicated or talented enough to last there, and didn't.

I'd say Mike and Richard's attitude to management was more Machiavelli's fear rather than love. But they were also fair. A lot of the smart bods did well and made loads of cash from the shares they received.

When I worked for him I was quite scared and awed by Mike, but when I met him subsequently I found him genial and decent. I'm very sorry for him to have died so young.