I hope this isn't really your view of MSR; if it is, you might consider whether your opinions of Microsoft are coloring your perception. How is all of the academic work done on Haskell, for example, motivated by an impulse to exclude others from the technology? Or consider the MSR contributions to the papers on http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html, many of which are theoretical in nature. Do you view Xerox PARC or Bell Labs's research in the same way?

Disclosure: I'm doing some contract work with the F# team in MSR Cambridge.