this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
619 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
70285 readers
3312 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People need to stop using M$.
Yeah, the EU has been building out alternatives to American cloud companies like Microsoft for a while now, and it's coming in handy for some of them. I think France in particular are working on this and launched their own alternatives to Google Docs etc.
https://www.techspot.com/news/107225-france-germany-unveil-docs-collaborative-tool-rival-us.html
Hmm we may have for a long time considered alternatives to the American cloud and tools but we still are extremely reliant on it in all administrations in France. As I recall 70% of our online government services are on American clouds. We also are almost exclusively using Microsoft windows and office for the desktop workstations.
I'm pessimistic in the sense that Europe has tried to offer an European cloud before. It was a spectacular failure that just costs us a lot of money so that businesses here could just take the money and then pretend they couldn't make it work.
We definitely had a real shot in Europe to be sovereign. We just missed it. It's never too late but it's so prohibitively expensive to switch out of Microsoft ecosystem that many governments entities will rather fork out money to Microsoft.
The city of Munich's move to open source software across thousands of workstations was by all accounts a success on a technical level, which I'm sure could be replicated by most European administrations.
The problem was, of course, political. The incoming conservative admin needed to paint the outgoing center admin as incompetent, and to do their usual corruption of course. So they jumped on a specific department's complaint about an issue with one piece of software to cancel and roll back the entire fucking project.
A few months later, Microsoft opened up their new European headquarters in Munich. By sheer coincidence I'm sure. And in no way related to the fact that they have an incentive in the billions to keep people convinced there is no workable alternative even decades later.
Bayern is truly the Texas/Alberta of Germany.
I think recent events are giving a lot of motivation for these kinds of initiatives that weren't a huge concern in the past.
There's likely going to be a bit of a scramble as we realise we can't rely on America and their companies anymore.
I agree. Trump just said that everyone that uses the services of American companies needs to agree with Trump or face the real risk of losing all their data.
In the face of that, even a pricier European option will look appetizing.