The only thing they gave away for free was a PowerPoint viewer software. Same with Word and Excel.
These are multi-billion dollar product lines, why would MS ever give them away for free? If you received it without paying, you likely bought a PC with Office bundled in. Somebody paid for it one way or another.
Mobile is a different business model, as people are used to paying nothing or very little for apps. It's similar to what used to be called "shareware" or 'trialware' back in the day -- apps with a restricted set of features, designed to entice you into buying the full thing.
Wait, Microsoft used to bundle Office for free with windows? When did that happen? (I'm pretty unfamiliar with pre-2010 Microsoft so I'm genuinely wondering!)
I vaguely recall that in the Windows 3.11 days there was a cut down version of Office (might have been called something else?) which was either free or at least frequently bundled with new PCs in the same way that Windows was.
I can’t find anything online that discusses this though. Most articles seem to talk about recent versions of Office (last 10 or 15 years) but the version I’m thinking of would have been pre-95.
I seem to remember Works was around £80, office 4.3 was around £400.
In reality whatever you had at work was free as you just brought the floppies home and installed it, which led to a generation of people being brought up on Microsoft products.
There was Microsoft Write ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Write ) but Word/Office was NEVER bundled with Windows. I used Microsoft products from MS-DOS 5 to Windows 7, and that never happened.
Likewise (well a slightly earlier version of DOS since that’s what my high school ran on their ring token coax network, plus some (by that time) old college stand alones that you had to run something like ‘park’ to park the HDD head before powering off). In fact I’m pretty sure I’d written some of my course work in Word for DOS too. Feels like a life time ago now.
Anyhow, there definitely was an office suite (lower case O) that was bundled with some PCs. But as another HNer points out it was Microsoft Works rather than Microsoft Office.
With Windows, no. But many, many computers were sold with Office bundled in through the 2000s. It's how my family got Office and how I think most consumer-side people did.
It's impossible to compete without making a whole different operating system when Microsoft was in it's anticompetitive heyday.
Even through the lease of how our world is meant to work that's seems messed up.