WordPerfect was the leading word processing program under DOS. When Windows was released Microsoft screwed with them by not giving them full access to all the Windows APIs (something Microsoft was notorious for). Surprise, surprise, at the same time Microsoft was not giving WordPerfect the API info they needed, they were releasing their own competitive word processor in Word.

But, once WordPerfect got access to the APIs, they produced a word processor that was superior to Word. The only reason that Word took off is that Microsoft aggressively bundled it with everything.

As for Outlook, I've never met anybody who actually likes it. The only thing it has going for it is that it's available by default and it's the only thing compatible with emails from other Outlook users. There's a reason its nickname is "outhouse". Outlook did the same things that Microsoft did with HTML and HTTP: embrace, extend, extinguish. They took de-facto and de-jure email standards and modified them so that only other Outlook users could use the email properly. They made sure that if you tried to use anything other than Outlook with Microsoft Exchange, that it wouldn't quite work right.

With Microsoft it's always about taking their monopoly in one area and squeezing another area, driving their competitors away. It's what they're now doing with developer tools, like github and visual studio code.

MS Word is significantly worse than WordPerfect. Reveal codes FTW.

There is currently* nothing Microsoft Office does that I can't happily do in LibreOffice

Outlook is unmatched by anything else? What do you mean? Any email client you take is as good in my experience.