The INQUIRER Top 3 Hug-and-Make-Ups

As these sworn enemies turned doting darlings attest, there are some people you can't live with and can't live without so you just sort of slide in and out of love with them. You argue and then you make up. Passionately.

It's Burton and Taylor. It's John and Paul. It's Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. It's Den and Angie. Go figure, but it makes the world go round. We should wait until Valentine's Day but there are some things that are bigger than this world and if we wait any longer we might burst.

So for all you star-crossed lovers out there, here you go with something for the weekend, The INQUIRER's Top 3 Hug-and-Make-Up stories.

3. Microsoft and Stac Electronics. Microsoft ramming the OS with a ton of utilities isn't new, kids. In 1993, it planned disk compression for DOS 6.0 called DoubleSpace but it had earlier talked to market leader Stac about licensing its Stacker software. Stac sued, Microsoft countersued and eventually, the arguing ended with Microsoft taking a stake in Stac and paying it royalties. That's the kind of romantic gesture it has repeated serially with Sun, Novell and others. Microsoft pulled DoubleSpace form DOS but the once-hot compression sector faded. Love can be rough.

2. Sun and Red Hat. The ancient chestnut had it that whatever you asked Sun's Scott McNealy the answer would be Sparc/Solaris but in 2002 he wore a penguin suit on a conference stage for a typically low-key endorsement of the OS and Red Hat in particular. The love affair was short-lived, however, and McNealy's successor Jonathan Schwartz prefers talking about Red Hat "forking" Linux while selling a bit on the side. Not very gentlemanly, is it?

1. Oracle and Siebel. Tom Siebel quit Oracle because Larry Ellison didn't get CRM, or so the story goes. Siebel set up what turned out to be the 800-pound gorilla of the sector but when times got tough, Ellison's Oracle snapped up the company in 2005. That's rough love for you. Now all eyes are turned to what Ellison will pull to bring down Salesforce.com, another company that is run by a former employee, Marc Benioff. Ellison has a stake in Salesforce that has proven a great investment but has made it known he would rather see it rendered worthless. The cad. µ