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Comment by mattkrause | Hacker News Reader

My impression was that Lernout & Hauspie had had decent--for the time--technology: they bought Dragon (admittedly in a shady deal), PowerScribe, and a few other "real" companies. It was certainly rougher than people might have desired, but this is the first time I've heard they didn't have any actual products.

I thought its downfall was more related to straight-up accounting fraud, with fake sales, hidden loans, etc.

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Like you mention, they acquired legitimate companies, but as far as I can gather, their own tech was fraudulent through and through. This is an account of someone who went on a roadshow with the Lernout & Hauspie sales team in the 1990s.

"They had this room with a whole wall of computers and you talked into a microphone and the computers would do the speech recognition. Then they put your sample through a translation program, and the program would convert it to another language. They were demonstrating the Holy Grail of speech recognition in 1999. It turned out all that was done by a man behind the curtain, literally the Wizard of Oz. The man behind the curtain just typed it in; everything else was an illusion."

From page 37 of this columbia.edu PDF.

https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/valueinvesting/sites/valueinve...

Yes, they did have a product and the parties that acquired the assets at bankruptcy firesale prices did rather well.

I think Nuance bought most of the assets. And 20 years later MSFT bought Nuance. Full circle!

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