Autonomy always seemed to sail pretty closed to the wind. Around 2000 they came to me to see if I would buy their semantic doc indexing thing for a dotcom I was IT director of. I said it was quite expensive and we didn't need it. They then came back with a proposal where we would buy some expensive HP SAN disk drives (that we also didn't need), they would throw the text index thing in "for free" and they claimed it would be worth our while because we would be able to write off the depreciation on the shitty disk drives against tax. I said it seemed really sketchy and I didn't want the maintenance burden of an additional SAN solution to look after.