I used to think such things, then Ballmer left and they dropped IE like a rock, and started renting Linux on Azure. Apple had made it cool to reinvent a company every ten years, and shown it to be potentially more profitable.

Don't forget, it was a long time ago but MS used to be quite cross-platform. My Commodore featured their BASIC "OS". They could be again. Will it happen today? Of course not. But it's not hard to imagine ten years in the future where NT is creaking from under-investment and finally abandoned in favor of much cheaper WINE/VM or ReactOS support. Operating systems and tools are now a commodity.