Curious. What do you think - has Microsoft been so successful in business at least in part because of its insistence per Paul Allen of keeping large cash reser

Curious. What do you think - has Microsoft been so successful in business at least in part because of its insistence per Paul Allen of keeping large cash reserves, larger than most companies keep on hand? (MiniMSFT blogger said something like, "Why? We're not a bank!") Or is it simply that Microsoft has held a very lucrative monopoly position for many years and just makes more money than it knows what to do with? I.e., perhaps its habit of keeping large cash reserves are just an effect of its success and not any kind of cause of it? The reason I pose the question is that I have been forming a layman's theory that in fact it is all about the cash, even as much for a huge company as it is for a small mom and pop store; that as long as a company has cash on hand it can go on, and when it runs out of cash the end is coming even if it takes years in a downhill slide. If you take corruption as a given, I suspect that all the accoutrements of big-company strategies like pursuing growth over profitability, borrowing money to run at a loss, etc., are nothing more than smokescreen thrown up by upper management to make it look like they're doing a good job when they're really bleeding the company. Rather than being a waste of resources, I rather wonder if keeping a large cash reserve is like a protective armor to keep a company from having to borrow at interest during rough periods. Is this completely off the mark?