Microsoft wanted you to buy their software. Google gives it away for free. That's the only thing I've come up with that explains the enduring romance.

It's not "free", they give it away to sell ads. With Microsoft, before the constant update stuff, you could at least say you buy version X of product Y and then you have that, like some tool in a tool shed. Now that's a shifting mess of attached strings, too, but Google was never anything but that.