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.
Managing a Windows OS vs MacOS and Linux?
Active Directory, GPO, Intune etc.
Jamf for Mac comes close.
And interoperability is a feature between the apps (somewhat) It used to be way worse.
SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) is head and shoulders above any other such tool I've ever seen.
I'm not sure we can say that Office is clearly superior, but at the very least there's no competitor that can claim to be better. Office remains the standard to which others are compared.
There are so many/different shell scripting platforms that it's impossible to really compare, but you can make a reasonable argument for PowerShell.
Taken as a whole, Azure is in 2nd place popularity-wise. But comparing service-for-service across the big three, there are certainly individual services where MS's offering is superior.
That allows them to enter new markets. And push new tools under the Office subscription.
If there was a more dominant player in the Office Tools space, then they might be stuck playing catch up.
Similarly Google Pushed it's office tools under the Gmail for Domains ( Suite, Workspace etc ) Subscription. They used that domination to enter new markets.