Answer by Joe Friend, Sr. Program Manager at Microsoft, on Quora,
I managed the Word PM team during Office 2007. Our team championed this change. There were two key reasons to support the change:
1. Growth of digital consumption. We believed that more and more documents would never be printed but would solely be consumed on a digital device. Given we started this work in 2003 (long before Surface, iPhone, iPad, Kindle, etc.) this was a somewhat controversial opinion (more when it would happen, not if).
To support digital consumption the new fonts were created to improve screen readability. They do this via a technology called ClearType. You can learn more about that ClearType here: ClearType Overview. There is an excellent blog post from the Engineering Windows 7 blog that gives additional detail on the ClearType: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7
The collection of fonts introduced at this time are called the ClearType Font Collection.
2. At the time, Office was looking to modernize the look and feel of documents created by the Office applications. They hadn't changed substantially since the early 90s. Among many other improvements, the introduction of the new fonts had a big impact on the modern look. The use of san serif Calibri as our default body font (instead of the old standard Times New Roman) was one of the more controversial changes.
Calibri was just one of several fonts introduced at the time (ClearType Font Collection). Many other ClearType fonts for various languages have been released since. New Fonts in Windows 7
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