“Tesseract, an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine has been released into open source. OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing.This particular OCR engine, called Tesseract, was in fact not originally developed at Google! It was developed at Hewlett Packard Laboratories between 1985 and 1995.”

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2006/08/announcing-tesseract-ocr.html

This brings to mind the importance of thinking not of potential competitors but of complementors and substitutors when defining the business arena and the product strategy. Following this line of thought, there is an interesting book that tries to merge business strategy with game theory, “Co-opetiton”
Link