[kevin061]

There are Microsoft alternatives for everything they offer.

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.

[p2detar]

With exception to Ubuntu and maybe Office your list is mostly enterprise-incomplete. Big corp cares about Active Directory, Teams, Azure and most of all Exchange (M365). Microsoft have managed to carefully pack all of these around Microsoft Entra and most IT admins in big corps are keen to get on-board with that.

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

[rawgabbit]

As an anecdote, I believe the final frontier in software development is permissions or who can do what. Entra is one of the few software that manages permissions at scale; even if it is user unfriendly.

[carlosjobim]

How did you forget that Apple offers alternatives to almost everything Microsoft has, and is one of the world's largest companies?

[kryllic]

You likely won't find a business office working exclusively with the Apple office suite of tools, despite how comparable their features are. No one ever got fired for suggesting Microsoft, and in the business world, the safest choice (read: one that ensures an individual's job security) is often the one people go to. Google also has its own suite of tools, and I would argue the choice is really between them and Microsoft, with Apple not receiving much attention. Proton is also creating their own office suite of tools, their version of Sheets was just released not too long ago [1] but I have a feeling they will be as ostracized in the business world as Apple is.

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1. https://proton.me/drive/sheets

[drdec]

> How did you forget that Apple offers alternatives to almost everything Microsoft has, and is one of the world's largest companies?

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.