Why do you think that? I was not around in that period, but the impression I get is that the foundation of Microsoft[0] was antithetical to "bringing programming to the people".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
The tools for programmers have remained a major part of their products during the MS-DOS era, until the early nineties. The documentation for their compilers and libraries was excellent and many people have learned much about programming from the Microsoft manuals (or from reverse engineering their programs).
Only after the transition to Windows and their success in suppressing the competition for MS Office by their control over the development of the operating system, the programming tools business has progressively become only a small part of the Microsoft products and the programmers only a small part of their customers.
Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter. It was all about bringing programming to the masses. Saying "to the people" implies some kind of empowerment, and I don't think that was ever quite as much a part of Microsoft's identity (although it was there in some form). "To the masses" is a better way to describe it in my opinion.
The way I accessed BASIC was to boot up PC-DOS (IBM-branded version of MS-DOS) and then run some program that was like QBASIC although it might not have been called that yet. Later I switched to MS-DOS 3.21, and that came with real QBASIC. I also switched from BASIC to Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. Great times!
Nobody ever thought they'd do that for free (except when they used piracy as a form of dumping, by turning a blind eye to it when convenient).