@blufox: as i understand it, sam ramji cannot post a public opinion as an MS employee without clearing with the lawyers and PR first. so, like any large corporation (not just MS), they have to think about their PR image, marketing etc when they make statements, so always take them with large pinches of salt whenever these so called influential employees of large corps make blogs posts, videos etc.
but i too am very optimistic that they will cooperate and if they must compete (after all linux is clear a threat), then they compete fairly with good code/products and not underhanded (possibly illegal) tactics. like the mini-microsoft anonymous inside blogger posted, maybe MS has turned the corner really... Win7, Bing and their Hyper-V stuff look promising, and i do hope they come out with better versions of .NET, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Windows Server etc...
btw, i really enjoy watching videos from places like channel9.msdn.com and reading MS blogs like those of mark russinovich...
edit: also, being a software developer, im a fan of the Visual Studio IDE (cant wait to get to use 2008/2010 versions) and a fan of Windows (client) since Win95 even though its widely criticised... rest of their products, dont like so much, aka crap: .NET, Office, SQL Server, Windows Server, "Hotmail", Bing etc... (some i dont care for, like Xbox etc)...