Didn't need the due diligence report to reject the deal
Around the time of the deal I was working at a place that was using Autonomy's software for the search functionality of the website. They had been users of the software for years, from when it was called Verity. Whenever I needed to find something on the site I just went to Google because I could never find anything with the site's own search. It was that bad. Can't blame the people looking after the software as they brought in consultants from Autonomy to set everything up. The website search was behaving like it was supposed to.
The place even sent me on some training from Verity/Autonomy. In the course they were using the US website of Best Buy as a wonderful example of their software. In the course I was playing around with the search on Best Buy's site and I remember I would search for an item, bring up the page for that item, search for something specific about the item such as the model number, and the search would return no results.
If HP just performed some searches with Autonomy's software they would have realized that any amount of money was too much to buy that company.