I think Microsoft is recognizing that locking people into an ecosystem is not a long term solution when there are near equivalent ecosystems available for free. It almost seems like they're positioning themselves to get mindshare ('Hey, this free product from the Evil Empire isn't that bad! Maybe they're just another empire, and not so evil.') and transition that into a paid service (Azure is what immediately springs to mind, but Office is pretty essential when you get past a certain point (I say this as a long time OpenOffice/LibreOffice user - there are some things MS just gets right).