So MSFT still needs to compete with OpenAI - which will likely have an extremely adversarial relationship with MSFT if MSFT poaches nearly everyone.
What if OpenAI decides to partner with Anthropic and Google?
Doesn't seem like a win for MSFT at all.
Then they would be on roughly equal footing with Microsoft, since they'd have an abundance of engineers and a cloud partner. More or less what they just threw away, on a smaller scale and with less certain investors.
This is quite literally the best attainable outcome, at least from Microsoft's point of view. The uncertainty came from the board's boneheaded (and unrepresentative) choice to kick Sam out. Now the majority of engineers on both sides are calling foul on OpenAI and asking for their entire board to resign. Relative to the administrative hellfire that OpenAI now has to weather, Microsoft just pulled off the fastest merger of their career.