1. Microsoft always sucked but their R&D department invested in Haskell, it has an actual compiler to native code and many of its features found their way into mainstream programming languages later on (list comprehensions, type inference, anonymous functions, parts of its syntax, nullable and non-nullabe references, generics/templates...).

Many of those features existed in other languages before, but those languages still have ideas that weren't borrowed by the maintream yet, such as rich Domain Specific Languages for certain libraries and many of its ideas related to concurrent programming (easy async I/O, concurrent queues, message passing, ...).
Other similar research languages can also be references for the future.

2. Many big issues nowadays are still being ignored such as garbage collection, solutions similar to Rust (which replaces GCs with a set of rules to be followed when dealing with memory) increase the complexity of programming too much to be a full replacement and languages such as Kotlin or Swift have absurdly slow GCs and maybe other performance issues that can be spotted in simple benchmarks.
Also hybrid solutions such as statically free'ing memory when it can be proven that it's possible to do so, tweaking how references work, mixing different types of GCs, ... are almost inexistent AFAIK.

3. Visual programming languages based on connecting blocks, building trees of elements, adjusting parameters, ... used to be terrible but nowadays they are usable and commonly found in game engines, shader programming and many others.
They certainly can be used in other contexts such as corporate apps based on the same ideas.