Trump drives European governments to Microsoft alternatives: What Germany, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria are planning
Wie europäische Staaten ihre Abhängigkeit von Microsoft reduzieren wollen
Even if the US weren't a shit show right now, this is still a good move. These top players have gotten very comfortable with their high user share. The only way to get them back to following the consumer needs/wants is to hurt them monetarily. Microsoft has experienced this before with IE and their assumed domination of everything computing in the early 2000s. People started switching away from their closed ecosystem and they, painfully, had to redesign things to meet needs. Windows 8 is the same thing. Ballmer's Microsoft lost alot of consumer sentiment by pushing things people didn't want.
The difference now is that so many people are willing to take whatever poop is shoveled at them. It will take more of us who are intelligent and discerning to flip away and bring others with us. Nadella will be the next Ballmer if he's not careful. Google will lose out to another search engine, or engines, if the aren't careful.
Open source is the way, but not without alot of support for "the lesser" among us. Fediverse and big social media alternatives as well. The Internet of today is nowhere near the magnificent beast it was in the 90s and very early 2000s. No intelligent person wants AI slop 24/7.
Fucking right they drop the shithole that is microsoft! About damn time
I wish my company would follow suit. But no. We somehow keep digging ourselves deeper into the toxic M$ cesspit. At this point, at least a quarter of the tickets we get is about one of their products shitting the bed (Outlook, Excel, Exchange, Windows itself—you name it) and us looking for workarounds to patch things up. Recent patch broke DHCP service on some servers. At this point, their updates and patches are less reliable and more dangerous than a random project on Github in alpha stage meant only for personal use.
This is the way.
Start developing open source projects, preferably in a coordinated European effort, then self host. Would also create more domestic jobs for people to help develop and host said systems.
I wish Canada did the same and ditched Teams/365.
Good to see - especially in government this is needed. In my team at work we are taking some mouse steps to reduce our Microsoft-dependence, but the enterprise at large is really deep into it all, and I learned today that there are some more systems being integrated soon, Purview and Defender being two of them. It will be really difficult getting out of this.
I have challenged my boss on what our strategy is to manage the business risk that a total lock-in of a single American company presents, given the geopolitical tensions, but I have yet to recieve a reply. My guess is that if we suffer along with everyone else that chooses similarly, no one's head will roll because it is what everyone else is doing. Nevermind us going bankrupt, that's a small price to pay to avoid getting any blame. Like back in the day when you wouldn't get fired for choosing IBM.
Look at the top valued companies in USA. This will hurt.
Two and a half years ago I asked in an internal forum if M$ could - in theorie - turn off their cloud services and would would happen then. A colleague said they could move the critical infrastructure to another solution within three days but nobody considered this an actual risk. Yesterday we decided to put a strategy in place to become independent from any geopolitical influence. Not only for our own systems but also for everything we do for our clients.