No. The RichText control was written for the Win95/Exchange email client.

Since there was now a RichText control that supported RTF in Windows, the Windows group could write a thin wrapper around the RichText control and replace Microsoft Write with Microsoft WordPad.

Support for Microsoft Word file formats came later once the Word group took over responsibility for the RichText control code.

Man… the backstory behind anything in windows is always some insane mishmash of backwards compatibility, repurposed tooling, and other assorted insanity.