It really is sad to see a company that's doing so well feeling that it still needs to resort to such practices.

If I has to guess, I'd say that the company doesn't even see much gain from these tricks. I mean, come on. How many people actually subscribe to MS Office because e.g. they saw it pinned as a "recommended" icon on the Start Menu? How many people bought a copy of MS Word because they saw that one-line ad underneath the Wordpad toolbar?

It really is sad. Even sadder, of course, is the fact that most people do not seem to mind. BUT if enough of them did...