I saw the topic of this post and was surprised. I received no less than 50 emails recently with this topic and thought it was spam of some sort.
Just wanted to add a note on M$oft and cash. They recently distributed some of their cash reserves to shareholders, but kept about 30 billion in the reserve. Each month their reserve gets one billion dollars added to it just from the profits from their software sales (ie Office). Their reserve also grows from interest. They have more than enough money for whatever they want to do.