The guys from Thinking Machines (at least quite a few of them) ended up starting a very weird enterprise software company called Ab Initio. They're an odd comp

The guys from Thinking Machines (at least quite a few of them) ended up starting a very weird enterprise software company called Ab Initio. They're an odd company who doesn't even get included in Gartner surveys because they won't release any information about their product. The only reason they get any business is because they participate in "bake-offs" with big companies like international banks and blow the competition (IBM, MS, Oracle, etc) away with fully scalable Proof of Concepts. I work with Ab Initio software sometimes, and its weird and annoyingly "enterprisey", but due to the parallel computing background of the guys who started Ab Initio, the software was capable of scaling up storage and processing long before anyone came up with Hadoop. Obviously its extremely closed-source stuff with a proprietary language used to configure it. I hate enterprise software companies, but Ab Initio is certainly pretty cool compared to the other ones, and the people I meet there who are old Thinking Machines guys are super brilliant and interesting. Another interesting point: the author of this article is Gary Taubes, who is the metascience guy who got big into low carb, high fat diets and the science that supports them.