Users don't care about the political battles between technology companies and just want the products they buy to work together, according to Microsoft. 

"I try to look at it from a customer perspective and most users are not interested in the turf wars that exist between companies," said Jerry Fishenden, lead technology officer at Microsoft UK.

"All they want is technology that works and integrates and interoperates well together." 

"Over the past couple of years the industry has shown great maturity in terms of working practically together to fix issues around interoperability while still competing in other parts of the market."

Fishenden maintained that a number of companies now use a system of 'co-opetition', or competitive co-operation.

He argued that although Microsoft's .Net competes with Sun Microsystems' Java, and Windows competes with Solaris, the companies co-operate in other areas of technology.

Microsoft also recently launched its CodePlex open source website to encourage developers to work with its software. 

"Microsoft has always had that very large third-party developer community out there using our platform on which to innovate and build their own niche products," said Fishenden.

"It is just an extension of that really, the shared source space making it easier for people to come together and choose the type of licences they want to use and then build the type of community they want."

However, in an ironic move given all this open source activity, the European Union is rumoured to be planning more fines for Microsoft because it feels that the company has not opened its technology up to other software companies.

"I cannot comment directly on the European Union case but I think that Microsoft as a company has been providing a great deal of documentation about its interfaces," Fishenden countered.

He suggested that Microsoft's agreements with companies like Sun, SAP, IBM, Jboss and MySQL prove that it is proactively engaging other firms in the marketplace to allow them to take better advantage of its technologies.