Dude, no one pays for desktop software on Windows either, and it's doing fine.
Not everything is a web app these days and many people still prefer to own their software instead of being a recurring revenue source for the same functionality month after month.
I worked at MS for a long time. I can say that sort of stuff hasn't happened for quite awhile, and people involved in it happening were fired, some of them rather publicly.
Now days, expense reports are gone over very carefully. Everyone at Microsoft attends yearly ethics training, which covers all manner of topics, including what is and is not acceptable to do to win sales.
Realistically, when it comes to cloud based productivity systems, the choices are Microsoft or Google.
> then the top executives with no technical knowledge are happy to sign multi-year contracts that lock them into those vendors
Any half decent company is going to have at least a CTO in charge of these decisions. The CTO should have multiple people working for them that are capable of making engineering decisions.
If a company sends a bunch of non-technical people to a technical presentation to make a technical decision, that is the company's fault.
2016 isn't that long ago, and that's just one that was badly-judged enough to have made the news:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-18-microsoft-gdc-...
The overall feeling inside MS at the time was "wow, that was stupid, hasn't that team being paying attention to how the industry has been changing?"
An even more formal policy change was then sent out, reminding people of dumb stuff they aren't supposed to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_licensing_corruption...
It was nothing in-your-face like strippers, but still pretty immoral.
It must be a toxic environment, working with people who needed to be continuously trained on how to be ethical.
Good on them for trying to do something about it, however.