This post by Ben Laurie on the contribution of 'many eyes' to fixing security bugs makes very interesting reading. MS is a powerful organization, but it seems clear to me that for one more reason, in the long term its prospects are fairly modest. It is now a behemoth, and as everyone knows, behemoths can't write software. For the time being I will continue to use some MS software (particularly Windows) but open source seems to me to be slowly but surely pulling ahead.
It seems to me that software like MS Office, browsers, operating systems databases, web servers are moving towards the regime of market cost pricing. I have been waiting for this for thirty years, and we are not here yet, and we may not quite get there in my lifetime, but the days when DEC could sell a FORTRAN compiler for a VAX for more than five thousand early-eighties pounds are long gone. At the time one could have bought a luxury sports car for that kind of money - there can hardly be a piece of software on the market that costs so much now. Only complete systems like SAP and Oracle Financials cost serious money, and I think this is more about deployment and support than actual software licences.
