If anything, their efforts in search and cloud compute delayed or muted the case for monopolistic behavior by others as they can point to MS and say, see, they are competing against us successfully, we’re not the big bad monopolists some claim us to be.
They invested $150 million in non-voting stock from Apple, at a time when Apple had $1.2 billion in cash reserves. As part of that Microsoft agreed to support Office on Mac for five year, and Apple agreed to drop their long running lawsuit against Microsoft alleging Microsoft copies the look and feel of Windows.
Apple's business was struggling a bit at the time, but with those cash reserves they were a long way from needing bailing out.
