Yeah that's kind of what I was about (though probably not worded very well). For the on-prem virtualization use cases they are interested in, they already have the necessary technology with Hyper-V.

I actually thought that vSphere offers some stuff in the hyperconverged area that Hyper-V doesn't, this is where I could see it competing with Azure. However it seems Hyper-V with Storage Spaces Direct seems to be pretty much on par, at least on paper.

So there's even less reasons why MS would be interested in VMware. Only maybe to get rid of a competitor.