This is a year of firsts for Microsoft: its first wide-scale layoffs, its first drop in quarterly sales and earnings, and now its first debt offering.

It sold five-, 10- and 30-year bonds Monday and raised $3.75 billion on the strength of its Triple-A credit rating from both Moody's and Standard & Poor's at negligible interest rates, barely more than government bonds fetch. It could have sold $10, according to Reuters.

The money is supposedly for general corporate this and that, like possible acquisitions and stock buybacks. Last year Microsoft's board authorized the company to borrow up to $6 billion and it immediately used $2 billion for its first short-term borrowing.

Since Microsoft has more than $25 billion on hand and made sure to say that it doesn't need financing, that it's just taking advantage of market conditions, the move led to speculation that Microsoft might make a really big acquisition.

Like buying SAP, an idea Microsoft had and rejected a couple of years ago but a notion reborn recently in the Wall Street gossip mills.

In India, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed the SAP talk as a "market rumor" according to Reuters.

IBM has also been bruited as a possible acquirer of SAP as a line of defense against Oracle since Oracle and Sun pledged their troth. But IBM software czar Steve Mills told Fortune IBM wasn't interested, that it was sticking with its application-free strategy because such a purchase would upset the delicate and far more profitable IBM ecosystem plus it would be expensive, more than $50 billion.