They can afford to do that because they have an entrenched quasi-monopoly in the public/enterprise desktop sector. You'll have to get office and windows at the

They can afford to do that because they have an entrenched quasi-monopoly in the public/enterprise desktop sector. You'll have to get office and windows at the very least, so why not include the license to all the other remaining products? The volume licensing deals make it very attractive even if you don't plan to use any of the other microsoft offerings. In fact, microsoft will still gain in marketshare alone even giving all those licenses out for free. The net result for large orgs is that if you request a product, and microsoft has some bundled one that looks similar, your purchasing request gets automatically denied. It almost doesn't matter how much better the alternative is for your use case (or, more often, the other way around: how much worse the microsoft product is). It's an excellent strategy, indeed.