Google offers Gmail and Docs for free to consumers, in order to hook businesses into using it (and mining the consumer's data, of course). And it's working great, they announced a while back that over 3 million businesses are now signed up for the commercial G Suite [0], paying $5-
$10 per employee/month in perpetuity (I personally consider the G Suite fantastic value as a business owner).
G Suite absolutely destroys Office 365 at the web experience. Gmail is far superior to Outlook online, and all of the Google Docs/drive online experience is extremely well integrated, fast, and intuitive compared to Office 365.
Microsoft wins hands down at the desktop experience though. If you have big or complicated documents and spreadsheets you can't beat Office.
For me personally, G Suite wins because by the time I need Word or Excel I'm going to reach for a full powered solution like Latex or Python.
Yeah, both Google and Apple have contributed to the commoditisation of consumer software. But I don't think it was a strategy designed to screw over independent developers though. It was designed to stop Microsoft.
Microsoft's 90s dominance was achieved by commoditising PC hardware, owning the OS market and the most profitable parts of the software market, and locking in the rest of the software market to their OS.
Apple and Google looked at this and decided that, rather than try to beat MS at their own game, they were going to change the rules to favour their own strengths. In Apple's case, that's hardware. In Google's case, that's web services and advertising.
Apple's strategy was to decommoditise hardware by making their products premium, desirable objects. Meanwhile, they gave their OS and its upgrades away for free, so decreasing the perceived value of Windows. Then they built a software market on top of their OS, one even more locked-down than in the old Windows model.
Google's strategy was initially to make the OS irrelevant by building the web into an alternative application platform. Then, when mobile arrived, they gave away Android for free in order to both encourage commoditisation of mobile hardware (discouraging Apple/iPhone dominance) and lower the perceived value of OS (harming MS/Windows).
Reality is all the big internet corps have been doing this for a long time.
Then there are those of us who develop fremiums which further reinforce this behaviour.
Now we price our products north of 100/month to try and weed out the non ideal customer.