Yahoo!/Forbes: This Is War

“Microsoft executive Martin Taylor’s schedule is packed with
meetings like the one in June when he met with representatives from
French drugmaker Aventis in his Redmond, Wash. office. Aventis has
tied together groups of computers running not Microsoft’s operating
system but the freely available Linux. These high-performance
clusters can analyze proteins at blazing speeds. ‘That’s great for
Linux,’ Taylor said cheerily, at the time.

“That same week–by coincidence, the company says–Microsoft
announced plans for a new version of Windows software to handle
exactly the kind of high-performance computing Aventis had set up.
Says Taylor now, ‘I’ll knock on their door in a few months so they
can check out our stuff…'”

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