...look at it this way: They can continue their stranglehold on the operating system market with the people who don't know there is a linux, or they can advertise the existence and support a competing product. If they're worried about the piracy of Office that was mentioned, creating a version for linux won't help that at all. In addition, they couldn't even reach the large number of gentoo users due to the fact that gentoo requires you to compile from the source code. The move that was suggested, while I agree it might be great for some things like getting offices to switch to linux, but if you look at it, releasing software like that is really not in Microsoft's best intrest--it's just not cost effective.
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...look at it this way: They can continue their stranglehold on the operating system market with the people who don't know there is a linux, or they can advertise the existence and support a competing product. If they're worried about the piracy of Office that was mentioned, creating a version for linux won't help that at all. In addition, they couldn't even reach the large number of gentoo users due to the fact that gentoo requires you to compile from the source code. The move that was suggested, while I agree it might be great for some things like getting offices to switch to linux, but if you look at it, releasing software like that is really not in Microsoft's best intrest--it's just not cost effective.