"I don't think [open source] is anti-Microsoft in the sense that it's giving people choices in the technologies that they use," Jonathan Murray, the vice-president and chief technology officer of Microsoft Europe, told BBC World in the first part of the documentary "The Code Breakers", which aired last week.
"Some people want to use community-based software, and they get value out of sharing with other people in the community. Other people want the reliability and the dependability that comes from a commercial software model. And again, at the end of the day you make the choice based on what has the highest value to you," Murray continued.
It isn't clear from Murray's statement which category he believes commercial open source companies, such as Red Hat and MySQL, fit in to.
Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child project, was also interviewed in the documentary, and disagreed with Microsoft's claim that open source is inferior.
"We've chosen free and open software because it's better, and because it means the children can participate in making the software better over time," said Negroponte.
Kenneth Cukier, a technology correspondent for The Economist, weighed in halfway between the two by claiming that open source offers similar functionality to proprietary software.
"One can consider open source software a lot like generic drugs. The analogy fits," said Cukier in the documentary. "Open source software... is essentially the same product â€" it does the same thing on a computer -- but it costs less," Cukier told BBC World.
The documentary also included footage of Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, giving a speech, and interviews with people working on open source projects in developing countries, such as the Schoolnet Namibia project and the Digital Doorway project in South Africa.
Given the amount of time I have had to spend making my wife's XP upgrade secure, and generally fiddling to make it behave, I can't see that it is in any way superior to one of the Linux distros aimed at the non-technical user. Either way I would have had to install and set it up. Compared to the Ubuntu 5.10 that I installed for my daughter, it is messy and uncooperative, and has over all taken up far more of my time. From my point of view as a small business user, Microsoft is pretty much irrelevant now.
If Microsoft can identify market segments that it can effectively serve, then it may continue to thrive, but if it insists on dominating everything I suspect it will end up with nothing.