For those looking for context around this acqui-hire/stewardship, here's our take from late 2016 when Silicon Labs acquired FreeRTOS competitor Micrium: Going

For those looking for context around this acqui-hire/stewardship, here's our take from late 2016 when Silicon Labs acquired FreeRTOS competitor Micrium: Going forward, we expect to see non-traditional IoT software and infrastructure platform vendors looking closely at the embedded OS space. A compelling OS offering could drive millions of device signups for IoT services platforms, such as AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure, and GE Predix, which derive recurring revenue from services rendered to an installed base of devices. Onboarding an OS offering (or complementing Windows 10 IoT Core with an MCU-focused OS in Microsoft’s case) would allow these players to potentially hook analytics and connectivity services into a portion of the billions of MCUs that are shipped yearly, bumping up services revenue substantially. We see this acquisition as a substantial, missed opportunity for leading MCU vendors, such as Renesas, Microchip/Atmel, and Qualcomm/NXP/Freescale, who we had shortlisted as likely acquirers. Micrium competitors Express Logic and WITTENSTEIN would be rational targets for the next round of RTOS acquisitions. We had expected Microsoft to refocus its attention on the MCU space (perhaps with a derivative of WinCE) but they have been more focused on providing runtimes for maker boards and playing catch up with AWS, than building out the bottom end of their OS portfolio. Ditto Google with Android Things. Think this is a great move on Amazon's part providing, but not forcing, an easy on-ramp to AWS for the billions of MCU-powered devices that ship every year.