Suppose customer A buys a product combination X + Y, and hires B to install the product for them. Suppose you are the vendor of Z and had hoped the customer would buy X + Z. It looks like you have lost the deal: but someone came up with an ingenious solution. This is how Microsoft reacted when the Nigerian government choose to buy 17,000 Intel classmate PCs with Mandriva Linux (I use it myself: not the biggest Linux distro, but smooth in use). This is what happened from Mandriva’s point of view.

Microsoft’s solution was to pay the company supplying the PCs (i.e. B above) to remove Linux from them and install Windows instead.

It appears that the Nigerian government agency involved was not happy with this and has asked for Mandriva to be kept.

It is not obvious how Microsoft can make money by paying people to use Windows, and this is presumably about locking competitors out of the market to prevent them from gaining critical mass.