To paraphrase a popular quote from IBM: “Executives and MBAs can never be held accountable: therefore executives and MBAs must not be allowed to make decisions.”
Slightly less flippant: The only way to stop this is to stop letting companies like MSFT gobble up smaller companies. That doesn’t seem likely in the near future, though. Once the Borg assimilate something, it’s just a matter of time before it’s digested and drained of value.
I'm not really sure what the point of encouraging new development is if the end result is "big company scoops it up and makes it shitty, but people get to enjoy it for a few brief moments before that happens."
In this frame you can see that making the product worse (paying less for its upkeep) and raising prices are just two sides of the same coin - extract more resources.
Almost no big company has any reason to shepherd a product in a way that's beneficial to its users because they have so much momentum that even changing their approach either costs too much money or those in power are too insulated from the outcomes (fix it for me or I will fire you while I continue to make bad choices and under fund the product).
Afaik they never took any (serious) VC money.