Anyone large organization has ever moved away from dependency on US BigTech has done so piece by piece. China is the prime example. They've been decreasing their dependencies every year back from when it was at its highest. Percentage by percentage. This is the way.
> “Besides word processors, Microsoft also has security solutions, cables, servers in data centers, access control, SharePoint, and AI across all of this,” De Jong explains. “So simply replacing Microsoft isn't an option.”
> And switching only partially would require a lot of extra administrative work and money, and wouldn't reduce the risk of data blocking. The American giant is the largest supplier of software and services to TU/e.
I'd be surprised if this article wasn't indirectly written by Microsoft.
And software is just a small part, the physical world is nuch more importance. There too they've become more independent incrementally.
That's modern academia for you.
In some of the Microsoft lore there seems to be a split between Gates as an "end user" guy and Ballmer as an "enterprise" guy. Despite taking his lumps in the late 2010s, it seems like Ballmer has prevailed as correct in his "enterprise" push. Microsoft has gotten really good at selling over steak dinners. Now Azure and M365 are starting to dominate. This gives Microsoft a strong distribution platform to push crappy initial versions of any would-be competitors to drive them out. They do tend to iterate those into decent products around the 3rd version.
But will people tire of that? I think so. In which case Microsoft will get what's coming.
I am pretty sure the the file explorer is "slow" because it's doing cloud sync crap in order to collect my data.
Nadella would rather sell thin clients into Azure OS mainframe.
I thought the whole MS-DOS thing happened due to Billy's mom being secretary for the law firm that had IBM as a client.
You don't need to match their product. You have a smaller user base and smaller number of functionally to cover than Microsoft.
> That gives American companies power.
Guess what happens if you don't do anything?
The trend of universities sacrificing long-term sovereignty for minimal short-term savings is concerning. I have observed this in my home country, where the strategic investment in national technology (which would return back to the country) is dismissed in favor of cheaper foreign platforms like Google. This approach naively puts sensitive research and institutional data on external servers, creating vulnerability where access could be compromised[^1].
Hopefully this person does not express the opinion of that university.
[^1]: https://agorarn.com.br/ultimas/google-bloqueia-acesso-ufrn-c...
152 TB is something nerds self host in closet home labs, no need to tie yourself up to Google. I though people went to google for solutions with much more scale than just 152TB.
I did a quick check and for a name-brand (but not DELL or HPE solution) 200TB self hosted server with redundancy you're looking at 16K USD upfront cost and then you need to add your own maintenance and support costs which shouldn't be too high with Brazil labor costs and university's easy access to (often voluntary) skilled labor.
From what I can gather this is still cheaper than paying Google.
OS: Ubuntu is British, Linux Mint is Irish, there are French distributions, and let's not forget SUSe from Germany.
Office: there is LibreOffice, which is not very good IMO, but also OnlyOffice, I think it is German, also Proton, and Infomaniak from CH.
For file sharing, NextCloud exists, but if you want cloud services, there's Jottacloud, Koofr, Proton Drive, and more.
For cloud, Hetzner and OVH may not be as comprehensive, but that just means you have to hire consultants and specialists to simplify deployments to something similar to AWS tools. Perfectly possible.
E-mail, you can self-host or just use Tutanota, Protonmail, Soverin, mailbox.org; there are thousands, really.
To believe that we can keep Microsoft under control just because there is a financial transaction in between is to believe in the more than debunked Angela Merkel policy or pacifying and democratising Russia through trade. Germany stood behind Angela Merkel for years, and at the end, Russia invaded Georgia and Ukraine anyway.
Peace through trade does not work. The question is whether the Netherlands values money more than sovereignty, because of course Microsoft offers an all-in-one solution to governments, but the other options are all small parts of the IT ecosystem, which can be difficult to keep together.
We lost a big customer yesterday to Microsoft. They offered them much more than we could and there were also internal politics where I believe most of that customer's IT pushed towards that decision. I think the culture around alternatives, especially European-made or maybe European-supported is lacking. This has to change.
edit: typo
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I think the point is to avoid dependence on US based companies as opposed to getting away from Microsoft specifically. You will notice they did not mention obvious Google products as an alternative either.
The only possible alternative to the entirety of Microsoft/Google is a European monopoly that is similar in scale. Indeed, such a monopoly does not exist (nor should it). People go to Microsoft and Google because they're already spending money on one product of theirs and there happens to be this completely different product of theirs which you also need as a business user. Sooner or later you end up using 20 completely different products that are "well-integrated" because at no point did you look for an alternative to any of those use cases.
Your job is not to go from 100% reliance on Google/Microsoft to 0% reliance, that'll never happen. Your job is to look at their offerings in isolation and reduce your reliance one product at a time. And yes, paying for 20 products from 20 companies is gonna cost you more when each of them needs to be profitable separately, only monopolies can afford to offer some product at a permanent loss.
This seems much less like a "monopoly" sort of situation and more of a "you explicitly chose to put all of your eggs in one basket" kind of deal.
What alternative does anyone have?
It's a procurement fallacy to let a corporation dictate what features should be there and not.
Second source … is one of the example of a major strategy against this.
Come on, that is an University, there are many many students eager to learn the art-of-migration, for free. Migrate away, one by one, department by department if needs be. Disable M$ Excel, give everyone Libreoffice , python, r, or any-other-linux-stuff, and if the professors are so wooden, let the students find a way to replace that wonder.xls with something else. Then repeat with next piece of the entanglement..
But, no, only complaining (a.k.a. need more money)
It's hard to take this seriously given that the ecosystem of alternatives has never been richer, IMO.
Word processing? Notion for web natives; my kids are growing up on Google Docs and Canva and will never know Office.
Email? Same for Gmail vs Outlook.
Messaging? While Microsoft gets a big chunk of the market via bundling Teams, there's Slack and a slew of options on the market for enterprise chat and messaging. They've also been forced to unbundle Teams in the EU market[0]
Cloud? AWS still holds a commanding lead and there are other vendors like Google, Oracle, et al. that offer competitive products.
Operating systems? My kids are growing up on ChromeOS. My dev team is maybe 80% macOS and 20% Linux. All of our software is shipped as Linux containers. The OS that most of us are interacting with is probably made by Google (Android, Android Auto, Android Watch, Google TV) or Apple (iOS, CarPlay, Apple TV) or open source (Linux) and not Microsoft. The OS running most of the software we access via the web is not Windows Server. The database that is backing the majority of those servers is not SQL Server and more likely to be Postgres or MySQL.
AI? Microsoft has aligned themselves with OpenAI, but it's not hard to see that Google is very competitive in this space as is Anthropic not to mention the Chinese teams doing stellar work with model advancement despite (or maybe as a reaction to) Western restrictions on hardware. Microsoft's open source VS Code and Copilot let you pick from a slate of Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI models.
Browsers? Search? Ad platforms? Social media? No, not even close to a monopoly.
Gaming and leisure? Nope.
To be clear, I'm not here to defend Microsoft; I'm voicing my disdain for a very poorly written article that in no way backs up the claim of Microsoft's "monopoly". By all means, please point out Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but do so with evidence and facts -- not your feelings and dated takes from the 90's. Very, very hard to take this seriously without more specifics or context (possible in some narrow context, Microsoft does indeed have a monopoly). At least from my perspective, for Microsoft to survive these days, they have to have at least a decent product at a competitive price; otherwise, there's always a strong competitor in every one of their major profit areas.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
People use MS Office because other people use MS Office. It's network effects.
> because there's decades of processes built around it
Sure they won't use it at school?
The notion of 'there are other choices' is simply not the measure of a competitive landscape in systems with very high switching costs, incumbencies.
The pedestrian view that we have for 'competition' is 'retail' - you move from one shop to the next.
Big Industry is nothing like that.
They entrench themselves, with standards, process, procurement, brand, strategic leverage at the Executive layer, regulatory capture.
My local 'pharmacy corner store' has the same 10 chocolate bars my whole life: KitKat, Coffee Crisp etc. It never changes.
Does anyone in the world think that KitKat has some magical 'product quality' beyond the 10 000 other variations of chocolate?
No - they have 'market power'. They control distribution, they have deeply entrenched relationships with retail, they have relationships with coco producers, which shows up in a lot of ways.
If a buyer want access to the release of the 'New Swiffer' - you can't just try to 'drop our other products' like KitKat, besides, consumers have not been trained on a different product.
Consumers have seen a lifetime of KitKat ads, we don't necessarily like it, but it's a known quantity and we basically 'submit'. There are other choices, but a bit further back, a bit more expensive, a bit more unknown.
The very fact that 'chocolate bars' are unambiguously a commodity - and yet - there is no 'apparent broad market' should well serve to starting thinking more about how these systems work.
Google pays Apple an absolute fortune to be the 'first choice' on iPhone.
Google pays a fortune to create/control Chrome - which makes $0 in revenue, but which is a critical distributional component.
So your kids use 'something else' because they're in a situation where they can - but when the go to the office - do they make their own choice? No - IT does.
If IT wants to move away from just Word - then they loose deep integration with so many other things: MS Office is designed to be fully integrated precisely to thwart off all of those individual incumbents - the only way someone can make inroads, is on the margins with something really powerful, like 'Airtable'. Even then, it's relatively niche.
Combine that with the Operating System, which integrates deeply with chipsets and scale, and you can see the power.
I think that Slack is essentially a superior product, but the law firms, energy companies, gov offices are going to be sold 'Teams' and that's it. I know a lot of people who use teams and have literally never hear of Slack.
Slack is the 'niche chocolate bar in aisle 3 that costs 20% more, that they have never tried and not sure about - just buy KitKat'.
I have colleagues - very educated - who only use Copilot for AI - they think that's AI. They're not allowed to use anything else - because 'security'. Copilot is a ridiculously inferior product, not only do they exist in the ignorance of that, they actually think it's 'great', partly because 'It's Microsoft'.
The power of 'Brand at Scale' is really hard to fathom - managers and executives particularly are moved by this. They probably believe in institutional power and legitimacy more than anything and so MS because a 'hard default' that becomes difficult to overturn.
If there's a problem with some 'uppity gov. official' somewhere - MS can make discounts, steak dinners, custom integration, talk to people higher up in government, and make a strong case as why disrupting the 'default' should not happen.
ERP like SAP ... are just interminably integrated, and AWS/GCP are practically different products they are so different.
All of that is the tip of the iceberg.
There is no 'free market' in the way our instinct may apply, which is mostly derived from our 'retail' position in the value chain - the market operates a bit more differently at that level.
At that level 'Market Power' is the dominating factor, and 'product' is always second, generally things need only be 'sufficiently good'.
MS is an ok company and can create 'workable products', Google has some 'great' (and some terrible products), it's all they have to do to perpetuate - there is absolutely nothing anyone could do to displace them without some non-market force (aka government regulates competition).
If this dependency becomes a problem , and I would suggest finally in 2025 it is, then the only way out is coordinated action.
After all that I just said, the true power of institutionalization is not always hugely critical: if KitKat disappeared tomorrow nobody would care. If MS word was removed ... and everyone just choose something else, the world would not miss a beat. I truly believe that if we all woke up tomorrow and had to use Bing, it wouldn't matter that much.
Aside from major market disturbances, like AI in which those 'adept players' will probably be ahead anyhow, then it takes coordinated action to disrupt these systems.
It's much better to view those things through the lens of 'power' and not so much 'product', unless 'product' is absolutely decisive, novel, and/or it exists outside of locked-down value chains.
Just another log on the fire: Microsoft holds a lion's share of market, but not a monopoly (anymore).