Well, it's a long time ago... but Microsoft bought our company Cooper & Peters, Inc. in 1997. We made a cross platform java ui library and a portable office clone. And yes, they really did buy us to shut down our portable work.

Not without some kind of effort.

Lets turn it around though, can you give some examples of Microsoft buying a cross platform tool and continuing to support multiple platforms with it?

I cannot think of any offhand.

I dont think they necessarily purchased it to eliminate the competition exactly, there is likely something about the tech that they really like/want. or maybe it is the people involved.

My wild guess is that they love the ability to target other mobile platforms easily, and will continue to support that. I do predict though that over time they will discontinue/shutdown/slowdown/disable the ability to develop for those multiple mobile platforms on Mac OS X and Linux. ie, that their goal in this case will be to persuade developers that they should be developing for all mobile platforms on Windows, using C#

While Microsoft didn't kill Virtual PC after they bought it, they did kill its support for OS X and Linux.

Not really. It has morphed into Hyper-V, which runs just about everything.

It will host some stuff. Virtual PC used to run on an OS X host which is the really important bit for people who don't want to run Windows on their box except heavily contained and wrapped up in a VM to be deleted each time.

FoxPro