The Google.com Web site has become a popular search service for consumers, but the company has been less active in the corporate search business.
"H.P. thought it was an entirely new platform, but Autonomy's clients said it wasn't as good as Google's corporate search product," she said.
It specialised in corporate search software, designed to speed up the process of trawling through massive databases of text and audio files.
Thus the animating paradox of their condition: they are reaping the benefits of the corporate search for cut-rate labour but also bearing the burdens.
Mark Hanna, head of security at Mr Murdoch's UK company headquarters in Thomas Moore Square, near the former Wapping plant, was in charge of routine corporate searches to uncover listening devices in the offices of senior executives and meeting rooms.
The startup's success is good news for Lynch, who is seeking to revive his reputation as Britain's answer to Bill Gates after the sale of his corporate search software firm, Autonomy, turned sour.
Since the acquisition, parts of Autonomy – which made corporate search software used by law firms and accountants – have been offloaded elsewhere, leaving Micro Focus to take on the remaining assets, about 20% of the original Autonomy deal.
LAST November, when Jack Welch chose Jeffrey R. Immelt to be his successor as chief executive of General Electric, executive recruiters and corporate search committees from coast to coast scrambled to court the two G.E. executives who had also been in contention for the job.
Emma Child, a partner in the investment banking group of Rose Partnership in London, a financial services and corporate search firm, said that in recent months she had noted a marked increase in the willingness of couples to live in different locations.
Microsoft spent $8.5bn on loss-making internet calls group Skype last year, and Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC maker, spent £7bn acquiring British corporate search software group Autonomy a few months later in a muddled bid to turn itself into a software and services supplier.
