Riffing on an idle thought from John Robb. What would the impact on academic CS research be if MS started downsizing Microsoft Research? One could make an argument that educational institutions are already oversupplied with faculty material given current enrollments. This would just be piling on. I think you'd see a little boost in startups and a big boon for startups. There'd be a few more Paul Graham types running around to either start new things or pitch in with existing concerns. Also, Amazon, Yahoo, and Google would win big. You might also see some trickle over into other non-obvious disciplines like biology and the social sciences.
That would also be MS throwing in the towel on leadership in Web scale computing.