Make Microsoft pay by switching to European companies for contracts instead!
To be fair, in this case Microsoft is not to blame. They were forced by their government.
Which means we should switch to European companies not out of revenge at Microsoft, but out of the necessity to have digital sovereignty.
Punish the companies and they will stop donating to their election campaigns.
Dump microsoft. Choose your own adventure. https://distrowatch.com/
This is for their cloud services, not operating system.
Still, it’s ridiculous that European institutions use Microsoft/Amazon/Google for anything. It should be homegrown and open source all the way.
I agree they should be sourcing local services, but I don’t think there is a service offering that is comparable today. Microsoft’s iron grip on businesses is due to multiple services all working togethor, easily administrated, highly customisable. OS, Entra, Intune, Exchange, Defender for Endpoint, Sharepoint, Teams each are on their own are not that great, but all togethor for a single fee with support (key for businesses) is attractive. An open source, or Eurorpean alternative is likely some years away but I read on Lemmy a few weeks ago of several initiatives that look promising.
That is only half of the story. Decades of propaganda towards making people expect perfection and making them immature and impulse driven is behind microsofts (and other monopolists) totalitarian reign over the corporate and political world.
Yeah this is true. I sometimes need to stop myself in a project with “don’t let perfect get in the way of good”, else I end up pouring time and energy on what is really not all that important. The same can be applied to a lot of things, including services purchases.
I can see there being companies looking for alternatives and then saying to themselves “but feature X and Y are such nice things to have and alternatives A and B aren’t as good in those areas!”.
I think a good example if Entra Conditional Access. It is a powerful security tool that pulls in information from other MS services, device health, etc. and apply other policies based on criteria. Google and AWS have similar alternatives, but I don’t think I have found an alternative. But also, this is not a critical system, its just nice-to-have.
Exactly. You can even go further with this point and see how this creates a system that drives its own monopoly because the cost of creating something like that is so high that the actual improvements in function get drowned out. It is digital populism.
Eh, our company doesn’t use any of those (and not even out of any kind of ideology, it’s just Google/AWS/Apple, which is of course equally bad). If the EU put the right incentives in place, governments and eventually even companies could migrate within a few years.
Okay just take my Microsoft example and template it for Google and AWS, the same point applies.
I’m hoping for a home-grown alternative to be born and adopted.
There’s already a ton of alternative email hosting solutions, and things like nextcloud can take the place of Office365. It all exists already.
Comparing Nextcloud to O365… well, I think you’re missing the point and I’ll just leave it there.
Yes & guess what OpenSource is truly international
The fact that Microsoft has the audacity to do this, should be a lesson why you never use proprietary stuff to begin with
How did they freeze his bank if he didnt use a US bank?
