I was referring to the examples in the comment I was replying to, not making them up myself. I like your examples much more (and upvoted you for them), but yours are what I had in mind with my original comment. Microsoft was able to create that "familiar" desktop experience after getting the court to rule that they were free to make Win95 as Mac-like as they wanted. "The look and feel of an OS should not be copyrightable" is sort of an odd position for a leading innovator to defend so vigorously in court. Getting that OS to run everywhere was more about making themselves ubiquitous--the "no matter what computer you buy, you'll have to pay us" monopoly thing--than about "innovation". Likewise for the "ancient software still runs" strategy of preserving the franchise vs. innovation.
And innovation in programming languages? I was using BASIC before Microsoft existed, and while I thought Visual Basic was a significant innovation, I knew the guy who actually invented it and know how Microsoft took it from him. ("Take our lowball offer or we 'invent it' ourselves and you get nothing.") Nothing Steve Jobs wouldn't stoop to, but not a great example of MS innovation.
And .Net was the MS response to the JVM and C# was their response to Java. Both were improvements, but it was obvious what they were improvements on. And those two (VB and C#) are the only MS languages to have any impact outside the research lab.
And fonts? Was it Bill Gates who took that famous calligraphy class and brought the world of fonts to "microcomputers", or was that Steve Jobs and the Mac? Was it Microsoft who joined with Adobe and created the desktop publishing revolution, or was that Apple, too? Well, yes, Bill and Steve did work together on font technologies later, but that was to try to break Adobe's font monopoly, wasn't it? That m-word again.
Again, I'm not questioning the idea that MS came up with many new ideas, and all innovations have predecessors. It's a question of degree: how big a change is this? MS's innovations, while real, were just not in the same league as innovations from Apple and Google, despite MS's enormous power, because MS's focus was on defending their existing monopoly from competition, while Apple and Google were more focused on attention-grabbing product innovation.