It's impossible to compete without making a whole different operating system when Microsoft was in it's anticompetitive heyday.
Even through the lease of how our world is meant to work that's seems messed up.
These are multi-billion dollar product lines, why would MS ever give them away for free? If you received it without paying, you likely bought a PC with Office bundled in. Somebody paid for it one way or another.
Microsoft never did this, but Apple did. And still does today.
I can’t find anything online that discusses this though. Most articles seem to talk about recent versions of Office (last 10 or 15 years) but the version I’m thinking of would have been pre-95.
I seem to remember Works was around £80, office 4.3 was around £400.
In reality whatever you had at work was free as you just brought the floppies home and installed it, which led to a generation of people being brought up on Microsoft products.
Anyhow, there definitely was an office suite (lower case O) that was bundled with some PCs. But as another HNer points out it was Microsoft Works rather than Microsoft Office.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works
(After reading the above link, Im surprised to see Works lasted so long. The last time I ever saw it “in the wild” was back on Windows 3.11)