It's not "free", they give it away to sell ads. With Microsoft, before the constant update stuff, you could at least say you buy version X of product Y and then

It's not "free", they give it away to sell ads. With Microsoft, before the constant update stuff, you could at least say you buy version X of product Y and then you have that, like some tool in a tool shed. Now that's a shifting mess of attached strings, too, but Google was never anything but that.