To the contrary, what it tells me is that Apple has lost confidence in its own ability to win on good ideas and good execution and is now being run by investors looking for quarterly returns and lawyers thinking this is actually a constructive way to "leverage the money they spend on R&D".
Actually, it would have been good because competition is good, and Microsoft proceeded to sew up the market as a monopoly for decades, using a slew of underhanded tricks to do so, and grossly undermining the position of the primary innovator who held a far better product. It wasn't until Windows 2K that MS even began to catch up to Apple's work, and then Apple leapfrogged with the NeXT purchase.
