Microsoft is much more diversified than that. They have entire consulting services and a world class research arm and many other things that Apple has no analog of.
Honest question: does Wall Street care? In my experience, this is the kind of thing that’s (rightly or wrongly) considered a “cost center”, not a “profit center”.
In some sense, that is the right move. For example, Intel was a market leader for decades while their research arm was very stagnant for many years too. Other times, it is short sighted not to price in what might be to come because you miss buying shares on the cheap before a huge technology/product leap.
Some people on wallstreet do. In Mckinsey's book Valuation, they make it pretty clear to the reader that companies who spend a lot on r&d tend to have outsized returns compared to their counterparts, who don't spend that much.
I didn't want to say this without doing a little bit of homework so I checked their Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research) which doesn't list any accomplishments, just claims they have a lot of patents, and their main site has a publication index (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publications/?) but publication is not a good metric for ever seeing use.
Here is a video of it demo'd: https://youtu.be/YKkULaN7J9o
Nope. Microsoft Research has some luminaries such as Leslie Lamport, Christopher Bishop, Xuedong Huang and others, but as far as actual research output that has been commercialized, there is not much to show off.
Except a 2.8 trillion dollar valuation at the top of the biggest stock market in the world.
Note that it does research and not R&D. You aren't going to get products from research but rather technology advancements that then get incorporated. That happens a lot, and they obviously publish a lot.
The Haskell 1.0 specification was published before Microsoft Research existed at all.
(I worked briefly on a Haskell compiler in those days.)