Very true, short term is self-interested and you have to be in today's corporate world, especially in the value multiplication/extraction/funding side.
I have no doubt Gavriella Schuster figured it would help her budgets and maybe provide growth through some converted customers. But that is short term as really the licensing model of many systems are dying and no one would ever recommend SharePoint if they couldn't use it for free to develop on and use internally. Some products would die faster without the partner program and the licensing model is ancient due to the cloud in favor of per-use/subscription/SaaS, licensing really only works for consumer products but even then it is tough. Microsoft already knows this as Azure is essentially their main product instead of OS going forward. So this move just seems badly timed.
The other reason people are so short term focused, especially in the management/budget side, is that building value takes lots of time and is risky to budgets. Therefore budgets are guarded heavily to focus on P&L which overrides research and the open mode needed to create products.
Simply doing something that is short term does damage but ultimately brings in short term gains (budget savings), those results can be quantified and seen as a good short term solution while most of these people are long gone before the network effects of that change are realized.
Building value takes time and that is why large companies buy up startups, they are value-focused. Even Apple with the iPhone really used all the R&D at NeXT/NeXTSTEP to move so fast and have such a solid market leading launch. Ultimately value creation rules the world, it is just the value creators are usually overruled eventually by the extractors.