I think any big company who does not like Google's dominance on the web would want to do that. The reason they all switch to a chromium engine is not that they don't care, it's because it was too hard/expensive to develop their own engine. If Servo has any potential in that sense, I don't see why a company like Microsoft would not want to contribute to that.
I think MS thinks very differently. Some months ago, one of their PMs said:
"It's time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really 'cared' about the web, they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than five percent?" [1]
Ask yourself, why are "web standards" or "standards bodies" good? Why should they have "power"? The W3C held back the web platforms for years.
What's the point of having an extremely complex standard that nobody else will ever implement anyway? Remember, it would take billions of dollars to implement a competitive browser and then you have to give it away for free.
If even a trillion dollar company like Microsoft thinks it's better to team up with a competitor rather than implement HTML all by themselves, it really should make you think.
Consider, there's only one Linux kernel, there's no "Linux standard", just one kernel - and the world runs on it. I don't see people running around complaining about how that's a threat, even though it's much harder to switch operating systems than browsers. Sure, there's POSIX, but that's a tiny subset of Linux features.
I wouldn't call POSIX a tiny subset of Linux features. POSIX makes up the vast majority of the kernel interfaces that applications actually use. Stuff like epoll and io_uring are the exception, not the rule.
Not thinking about this too deeply, would Chromium become like Linux in this situation? Linux has heavily won the server market but many different flavors of Linux are being deployed still without a single, overwhelming winner. Maybe contributions like Stylo to Chromium could improve the web for a larger audience of people than Firefox could reach in its current state.
Microsoft has made two working browser engines: Trident and EdgeHTML. They've killed both in favor of Chromium; I don't see how it would cost them less to develop Servo than to have kept working on EdgeHTML.
I said at the time that Microsoft should have stepped into to sponsor Firefox, and make a firefox-based IE. Surely between the two of them Chrome could get some better competition.
