Not if you think the utterly incompetent board proved itself totally untrustworthy of safe development, while Microsoft as a relatively conservative, staid corporation is seen as ultimately far more trustworthy.
Honestly, of all the big tech companies, Microsoft is probably the safest of all, because it makes its money mostly from predictable large deals with other large corporations to keep the business world running.
It's not associated with privacy concerns the way Google is, with advertisers the way Meta is, or with walled gardens the way Apple is. Its culture these days is mainly about making money in a low-risk, straightforward way through Office and Azure.
And relative to startups, Microsoft is far more predictable and less risky in how it manages things.
I think it only seems that way because the open-source world has worked much harder to break into that garden. Apple put a .mp4 gate around your music library. Microsoft put a .doc gate around your business correspondence. And that's before we get to the Mono debacle or the EEE paradigm.
Microsoft is a better corporate citizen now because untold legions of keyboard warriors have stayed up nights reverse-engineering and monkeypatching (and sometimes litigating) to break out of their walls than against anyone else. But that history isn't so easily forgotten.
I can install whatever I'd like on Windows. I can run Linux in a VM. Calling a document format a wall is really reaching. If you don't have a document with a bunch of crazy formatting, the open office products and Google docs can use it just fine. If you are writing a book or some kind of technical document that needs special markup, yeah, Word isn't going to cut it, never has and was never supposed to.
Apple's walled gardens are probably a good thing for safe AI, though they're a lot quieter about their research — I somehow missed that they even had any published papers until I went looking: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/
Not if you think the utterly incompetent board proved itself totally untrustworthy of safe development, while Microsoft as a relatively conservative, staid corporation is seen as ultimately far more trustworthy.
Honestly, of all the big tech companies, Microsoft is probably the safest of all, because it makes its money mostly from predictable large deals with other large corporations to keep the business world running.
It's not associated with privacy concerns the way Google is, with advertisers the way Meta is, or with walled gardens the way Apple is. Its culture these days is mainly about making money in a low-risk, straightforward way through Office and Azure.
And relative to startups, Microsoft is far more predictable and less risky in how it manages things.