Internal documents reveal European Commission fears over Microsoft dependency
Election of new EDPS might end up deciding future of Commission's Microsoft use.
Imagine how much better LibreOffice would be if a fraction of what EU / European governments spent on MS Office went there. It’s your own damn fault for not fostering alternatives.
“There are no known credible offerings from European providers,” reads an internal Commission document seen by Euractiv.
I don't understand what they are comparing, are they literally comparing every single feature of a trillion dollar software corporation like for like? as in are they wanting one giant like for like quick swap from office365 to like, libreoffice365? or are they saying the core features they need cannot be provided at all by european companies?
And if this is the case, where does this leave Nextcloud?
This is bitterly disappointing, alongside STILL not having a single EU capital market
Well, obviously there is no direct drop-in replacement when you keep tolerating and paying billions to a monopoly 🙄
And as long as their committment to open-source and European providers is limited to pocket change and stupid blockchain or AI initiatives this will obviously not change.
Then why did they fire the data security officer?! He literally told them over and over that office 365 is a bad move and not compliant.
The brief:
We have done nothing to stop the monopoly and now the monopoly is doing monopoly things.
Suprised Pikatchu
Ps.: we still wont do anything about it and just hope that the monopoly magicaly gets a competitor over night without any support or market regulation.
“We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”
Use open source products, and if the software creation is paid for with tax money, the source belongs to the public and should be open source too.
the fear is not about Windows but the online cloud service Microsoft365 and yes to offer an European alternative to that service you need shit ton of money to operate a datacenter big enough to offer services without lag or data size problem for millions of users (at least if you want to be a real concurrent to Microsoft365).
on a smaller size, there is Nextcloud in the Open Source space that integrate a lot of tools that Microsoft365 has... So a good start exist for a more privacy solution, but that's on you Brussel to create full time jobs to makes open source MR/PR to improve the scalability and the feature of Nextcloud while staying true to the open source spirit...
We should be worried about Windows as well to be completely honest. But at the very least, it's still more replaceable.
Nextcloud is a great start point, but it's terribly underfunded... as are all of our "alternatives" to big tech companies.
As a GNU/Linux and BSD user I can't be agree more.
For the funding, Brussel as the money... If they decide to reroute the money they spend to GAFAM to their Open Source equivalent projects instead Nextcloud, Mastodon, Peertube, Matrix, etc... would not stay under-fund.
The sad thing is that there was an official Mastodon and Peertube instance that stayed up for years but was highly under-fund itself. The European Commission decided to cut the few funding left in 2024, closing both instance.
We've had FUCKING DECADES to do something about this. DECADES!!!
When will we ever learn....
I think its fair to be concerned.
Microsoft offers the operating system for endpoints and a good number of servers
They offer the office suite which I'm sure over 90% of companies use
They offer file sharing solutions such as OneDrive and SharePoint which integrate natively with the office suite offering
They offer the critical business services for creating accounts, managing devices, deploying software and updates, many of these features integrate natively with the operating system
They offer security services, which again, integrate natively with the operating system.
Its not impossible to find solutions to all of these, but finding reasonable alternatives that only work a fraction as good as some of the native features Microsoft offers, it's understandable that there becomes a dependence on just sticking with the Microsoft option.
Sharepoint is a pain to use, For sharing OneDrive does nothing better than other drives, Nextcloud offers Office integration which should cover most use cases...
From the end user perspective, even in a business context i dont see MS to be that much better, its just people sticking with what they are used to.
From an admin perspective i have the feeling it has gotten much worse, and whenever i had to read up on slightly administrative stuff with MS products, the documentation was terrible and things seemed needlessly complicated. Here again i have the feeling that a lot of it is a lock in effect from people just doing what they are used to and expanding on that, rather than learning anything new.
Meanwhile one of my customers is struggling to merge their 365 accounts into one new structure after a merger. They even hired some consultants who only made things worse instead of helping with it. So everything being with Microsoft as the single provider, while running the same systems, still makes integrating the systems obnoxiously difficult.
I'd argue the dependence on Microsoft products isn't a result of rational business choices, but lack of qualification and knowledge meeting predatory business practices and a FOMO/technical lock-in effect.
I agree with all of your statements there, the FOMO and lock-in effect has what has lead to such a dependence.
Not to mention IT staff are heavily geared to supporting Microsoft products and eco systems. Not saying most IT professionals can't pivot but when the whole industry is Microsoft focused then you're at a disadvantage if you're not up to speed.