But I feel they catch a lot of flak that isn't entirely deserved.
[...]
They are doing a lot to advance technology and everyone benefits.
Microsoft deserves most of the things they get, and while a lot of the things they did defenitely benefitted everyone, they clearly don't do it for that reason.
MS does not sell software anymore, they sell services, and a whole ecosystem, and this extremely aggressive. Looking at the development tools, they currently build all around their Azure systems. You not only host your applications on Azure, but you use github together with Azure devops for development, you build your backends using Azure functions store your data in your Azure SQL databases, have user management through your Azure AD, etc.
Yes many of their solutions are good in isolation, but once you are in the ecosystem, you can't easiely leave. It's also usually quite cheap in the beginning but costs alot when scaling up. So when you start developing using all these tools seems like the perfect deal, you get all the infrastructure and security and common functionality for "free", and as you pointed out, Microsoft puts a lot of money into R&D to make these things good.
But while this is amazing at prototyping, as soon as your application has a certain size, you can't easiely get away anymore, as it would require basically a complete rewrite. The tools you are using are only provided by Microsoft, so you are bound to their price structures. For most projects there comes the point the on demand cloud pricing of Azure will become extremely expensive for a production system, but you've built your app around Microsoft, you can't use it without Microsoft. You can neither self host, nor simply switch to a cheaper competitor like AWS or any "traditional" server hosting company. You always must keep spending more and more, and Microsoft can set the prices without any competition.
And if there is anything that may challange them, they just buy it and incorporate it into their plattform. They are buying up all these development platforms for a reason.
Yes Microsoft is doing alot of R&D and builds really good products, there is absolutely no doubt about it. I personally really like VSCode for example. But it all revolves around a buisnessmodel which is inherently anti competetive and instead of benefiting everyone tries to lock you into only being able to work with them. They give out breadcrumps to lure developers into a closed system they are going to be locked into.
And taking it back to Github copilot, its a system fully built on code by others that is hosted on Github, code Microsoft has no buisness with except for having bought the platform it is hosted on, and they built a system, which they are selling and incorporate into their ecosystem. And the system has been shown to reproduce code fragments from open source code verbatim. So basically is Microsoft currently taking open source code, stripping the license away and selling it to it's customers.
Or they recently put out an open letter urging regulators to put a temporary suspension on AI research due to "AI safety" concerns, conviniently now that GPT4 is going to be released to ensure that competitors like Google can't bring their solutions on the market
Also just on a side note about MS R&D, when I was in University I've worked in research in software testing. MS is by far the biggest testing company and did a lot of research in there (when you ever wondered why there are no more bluescreens, it's because microsoft has introduced mandatory testing suites for drivers they developed with that research). While they published many papers, they never published the tools they've build or any tangible data. Basically their papers where just advertisements on how great their tools (which you could rent as a Software as a Service model) are. This is not uncommon for companies, it is the norm for industry research other companies like LG or Samsung do the exact same thing.
Microsoft is very careful in what they publicise and what not. Unlike for example true public research (i.e. by universities), company research is first and foremost for their own benefit, and public access will often be restricted to a minimum. So the public benefit will also be at a minimum.