Note also that Microsoft employs Simon Peyton-Jones, one of the foremost contributors to the Haskell programming language, so it's not clear that they needed to

Note also that Microsoft employs Simon Peyton-Jones, one of the foremost contributors to the Haskell programming language, so it's not clear that they needed to create F# for language researchers. Although, as Don Syme says in the interview quoted by TomOfTTB, an ML type language mated much more neatly with .NET than Haskell did, so you might still be right.