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 had billions in incentives to keep people convinced that even decades later there is no workable alternative.
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.
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 had billions in incentives to keep people convinced that even decades later there is no workable alternative.
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.