I imagine microsoft.com received quite a bit of direct traffic last Tuesday when preorders opened for the next Xbox consoles. Also, .NET Framework, .NET Core, Entity Framework, Entity Framework Core, and Azure documentation is all hosted at microsoft.com (to name just a few).
I don't mean to discredit your main point, that a lot of domain use can be credited to application or OS logic, but to say no one goes to microsoft.com is a bit weird.