For years they loathed one another, rarely missing an opportunity to pick a fight. Their rows, full of sarcasm and sniping, occasionally hit the headlines. Then they started meeting discreetly every now and again-and ultimately realised just how badly they needed each other. Now, to the surprise of many, they have told the world about how they were really made to be together after all. This is the backdrop to events that have caused a stir this week in the world of cor- porate computing. On June 24th Oracle and Microsoft announced plans to work closely together in the "cloud"-the business of delivering software and services over the internet. The following day Oracle unveiled another partnership, this time with Salesforce.com, a pioneer of cloud-based services such as hosting businesses' marketing and customer-relations systems. The day after that, Oracle announced yet another alliance, with Net-Suite, another provider of cloud-based business software. Oracle also unveiled a new, cloud-compatible version of its database software.
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