Hooray for a bad decision...
I remember years ago 2002'ish when corporate interest really begain to build in virualisation ( at least in my corporate - virtualisation had been around before that ) and M$ had no product to offer but was clearly nervous about it. They had the chance to buy VMWare , but instead bought Connectix which is where they got the abomination that was Virtual PC from.
The general feeling , as I recall, was that if M$ were serious about the potential they would buy VMWare but if they just wanted to try and spoil the market by having a crap virtualisation offering ( with the forever unfulfilled promise of something better to come ) they would buy Connectix.
Hard to imagine where we would be now if they had bought VMWare and then hung it out to dry.