Europe's failure to facilitate a competitive tech scene in the early 2000's (and even still ongoing today) will haunt them for decades. Such an enormous fumble that people still celebrate as a win.
Along with Europe's incompetence and divisiveness, you must also consider that the US has kept it so tight under its umbrella that it has squeezed it. The US wants a rich market to sell into, a suitable ally for oil campaigns, but not a competitor.
The US is also still cultivating divisiveness, at the EU level, they groom a politically aligned minority that conveniently opposes any long-term improvement (Looking at Meloni's Italy, Hungary, etc.), at the country level, where possible, they again groom divisiveness by propping up yet another sovranist party.
Of course, that's what a "normal" competitor does, and of course China russia are also taking part in it. But the ambiguous situation of the USA-EU friendship needs to be solved.
I don't see how the EU can get out of this without recognizing that the US is not a friend anymore, and enduring a few decades of protectionism at the services level to try to pull a china on key sectors.
AWS had announced a sovereign European cloud, probably to avoid a loss of business in the long term due to these initiatives. But it's questionable whether this would survive strong political pressure from the US government.
Is it really that hard to switch to [google|libre|apache|free|etc.|etc.]? It seems like at the university level the ideas are the important part, and the need to write/spreadsheet at the bleeding edge of functionality much less so?
At this point all tech is big business. Microsoft or Apple. Azure or AWS. Google Apps or Office. Even dealing with Red Hat feels like you’re dealing with big tech.
And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.
It's like the proposals to get rid of daylight savings time. People get ruffled when the time jump happens, so conversation of getting rid of it bubbles up.
But then a week later everyone has adjusted and the motivation to fix it is forgotten.
Gov don't move because it's not worth the risk for people with decision power.
If you succeed, there's no big win to tag on your resume, if you fail (the most likely to happen) you're out.
Moreover, the people working for the teams that should make the migration usually don't want a migration, so you have to perpetually convince them of the future gains.
For the last 10-15 years, very few revolution have been made in gov ICT. Most of the job is usually rewriting existing app in a recent language or creating apps for not critical features.
Obviously terrible seeing the US government harm its own international standing for no real gain, but if it results in Europe developing viable alternatives to American big tech services, that'd be fantastic.
step 1. have syadmins run your stuff, recruit ITSM kids to help run it! We all learn and maintain our own hardware, software and get to poke at the fun internals of email, storage, etc.
I spent the past year working for a company that relies heavily on Microsoft for email, productivity tools, and identity management. After that experience, I can say with confidence: never again. The support is astonishingly poor, and user experience feels like an afterthought.
More importantly, using Microsoft at scale can leave your organization fundamentally insecure. The obscure, insecure defaults are, at best, dangerous missteps and, at worst, borderline negligent. I’m convinced that only a small fraction of enterprises using Microsoft have the expertise and budget required to secure it properly.
My personal view is that if your organization depends heavily on Microsoft, it’s not serious about security, whether they’re aware of it or not.
Where do I find money to fund my rewrite of Kerberos 5 in Rust, removing the dumb options and Kerberos 4 compatibility and eventually create Kerberos 6 + AD that will solve a metric buttload of issues in Linux and knock a major peg of MS off?
I work for a company that now uses everything from Microsoft. They used to have Jira, AWS and tons of other different products, but now everything is Microsoft, and it's terrible. Azure DevOps is particularly horrific. It's like Jira+Jenkins except you can never find anything. Nothing about it makes sense to me.
As far as I can tell, the databases on Azure are all either slow, expensive, or both.
And of course it means we hand over all of our highly sensitive data to a company that has said that US law will overrule EU law. How can anyone trust a company that says they will not obey the law?
I'm always amazed at how needlessly complicated and useless administration of Microsoft products and services are. So much of 365 feels like it is 75-90% completed then abandoned. Every time I find something that sounds like it should be really useful, it turns out to lack at least one function or feature needed to do what I would need it to.
Even if you do, you’re still going to get breached. They drop features all of the time that open potential vulnerabilities.
I used to run a Microsoft productivity ops team. Email/SharePoint/etc. Our headcount was about 20-24. O365 dropped that to ~8. Now? I’m told it’s about 60, much of it relating to security.
I did a 4 year degree in earth science minor in CS graduating in 2019 and had to touch microsoft for arcgis in one class, and an excel spreadsheet in another.
Like yeah if you have a lot of pre-existing infrastructure migration can be a pain but MS is not in anyway necessary.
Same here in 2000s, studying CS was completely MS free. The professors mostly used linux or Mac anyhow. The university system for students was web based. Papers were written in LaTeX with official template. The email system was hosted by the university and not based on outlook. Math related professors did not even use a PC at all during class but a blackboard/OHP/paper. So I don't see a problem for the netherlands..
I can guarantee some dutch banks are also locked into MS. Maybe not the big ones that actually need to care about tech, but the ones that don't care about tech went head-first into Microsoft Suite these last few years.
Its' an awful sight. What's worse is that there's no argument for this extra cost (apart from maybe vendor lock-in), and now no one knows who to blame for the big bill that comes in every month.
We switched completely to Microsoft/Azure a couple of years ago. My previous employer as well.
There was no stopping it, I'd tried and they looked at me like I'm crazy. "Everybody else is doing it" is a very strong argument.
At the same time, a very popular open source security package that I wanted to use was deemed a security risk because the maintainer has placed Ukrainian and Palestinian flags in the readme.
Can they get rid of Typescript, npm, Github, VS, VSCode, .NET, C#, F#, C++ / DirectX, Next.js, vcpkg, Microsoft contributions to Java, Rust, and Linux kernel, on their students teaching materials?
If they can switch to UNIX FOSS technologies with zero trace of Microsoft's money sponsorship, and hinder the students careers in specific job markets, then surely.
People usually never look beyond getting rid of Office and Windows.
The problem is described in the first two sentences of the article:
> "The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court suddenly couldn't access his email. According to Microsoft, that's because of US sanctions against the court's employees."
Nothing you've listed relates to that.
If American services and platforms have become unreliable and untrustworthy because the American government is erratic, then it's only natural that European organisations will look for alternatives.
DirectX is a funny one to list because 90% of Windows games run on Linux. WINE and Proton solve that problem for you:
In the 90s I used to sort of tease/banter our sysadmin guy at a small, developer-centric company in Europe (SunOS/Linux/etc-focused) in a friendly way with something like:
"It seems to me like all the things you're doing can and should be automated at a larger scale."
Ten years ago when I recalled this I felt sort of good about the prediction. What I predicted pretty much happened.
That sysadmin guy has become some sort of CIO and seems to be doing well.
I did not anticipate the loss of data sovereignty.
.... and now I'm doing like 50% SRE/devops. Who's the sysadmin now, but without physical control of our data?
For one reasono another im not seeing any of the currently OSS solutions like LibreOffice/OpenOffice.orgwould not gain much traction and will remain niche even as the MS/Goog options remain entrenched.
The path taken by Blender(propreiety initially to open source) to reach industry lead would to me seem the most viable to make a dent.
In that i think best cost effective options like WPSOffice or Corel Suite , would be a good option.They have the professional usability in the interface and functionality.
Corel is basically leaving the market wide , by mostly collecting rent from lawfirms as they are well taken care of there.Considering they used to have viable Linux options , seems a lack of vision theer to pick up marketshare.
I have found daily-driving Ubuntu at Delft shocking pleasant. Chrome, zotero, obsidian, zoom, and so on all work great. Outlook, teams, and the office suite, and signing pdfs are all the sharpest edges by far.
I feel if the TUs were required to dogfood this, especially if generously funded such that startups could come along and provide the same service and support, that it could be a great positive externality
If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail server and some office tools.
They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.
But what's the alternative? Most people use either O365 or Google Docs.
I hate that people are incapable of using Libreoffice and mailing documents around, but modern users are addicted to "the cloud", and it's my understanding there's no EU centric competitor to those two giants.
I have time so I tried to study one or two things. The harsh reality is that every university that supports remote studies I have looked at explicitly or implicitly required apple or even worse windows hardware.
I was one of the people fighting for keeping Unix when the UU went to Exchange. It was a drama: instable af, the MS consultants could not keep it running even for 24 hours at a time while unix had 0 issues and kept chugging along (I don't remember what Unix: I think it was SunOS/Solaris). It was forced through at great cost and effort but of course sponsored by MS. It sucked for years to come.
I was at the UvA too when they moved to, equally instable MS stuff too: I worked behind some of the last Sun machines and got to take a palet of sparcstations, ultras and an e450 home when they got phased out (I still have them and they are still working, of course). Could have all been Linux now but MS was so aggressive and no one listened to profs or students, even in all tech deps who were all vehemently against the move.
72 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 77.1 ms ] threadThe US is also still cultivating divisiveness, at the EU level, they groom a politically aligned minority that conveniently opposes any long-term improvement (Looking at Meloni's Italy, Hungary, etc.), at the country level, where possible, they again groom divisiveness by propping up yet another sovranist party.
Of course, that's what a "normal" competitor does, and of course China russia are also taking part in it. But the ambiguous situation of the USA-EU friendship needs to be solved.
I don't see how the EU can get out of this without recognizing that the US is not a friend anymore, and enduring a few decades of protectionism at the services level to try to pull a china on key sectors.
And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.
But then a week later everyone has adjusted and the motivation to fix it is forgotten.
Moreover, the people working for the teams that should make the migration usually don't want a migration, so you have to perpetually convince them of the future gains.
For the last 10-15 years, very few revolution have been made in gov ICT. Most of the job is usually rewriting existing app in a recent language or creating apps for not critical features.
Servicing the jobs-to-be-done of the core applications is pretty straightforward I think.
I'm not sure what keeps people locked in besides identity. Article doesn't really specify.
step 2. cost savings by firing them all
step 3. we get locked in
step 4. oh no how did this happen
More importantly, using Microsoft at scale can leave your organization fundamentally insecure. The obscure, insecure defaults are, at best, dangerous missteps and, at worst, borderline negligent. I’m convinced that only a small fraction of enterprises using Microsoft have the expertise and budget required to secure it properly.
My personal view is that if your organization depends heavily on Microsoft, it’s not serious about security, whether they’re aware of it or not.
As far as I can tell, the databases on Azure are all either slow, expensive, or both.
And of course it means we hand over all of our highly sensitive data to a company that has said that US law will overrule EU law. How can anyone trust a company that says they will not obey the law?
I used to run a Microsoft productivity ops team. Email/SharePoint/etc. Our headcount was about 20-24. O365 dropped that to ~8. Now? I’m told it’s about 60, much of it relating to security.
Like yeah if you have a lot of pre-existing infrastructure migration can be a pain but MS is not in anyway necessary.
Its' an awful sight. What's worse is that there's no argument for this extra cost (apart from maybe vendor lock-in), and now no one knows who to blame for the big bill that comes in every month.
There was no stopping it, I'd tried and they looked at me like I'm crazy. "Everybody else is doing it" is a very strong argument.
At the same time, a very popular open source security package that I wanted to use was deemed a security risk because the maintainer has placed Ukrainian and Palestinian flags in the readme.
Can they get rid of Typescript, npm, Github, VS, VSCode, .NET, C#, F#, C++ / DirectX, Next.js, vcpkg, Microsoft contributions to Java, Rust, and Linux kernel, on their students teaching materials?
If they can switch to UNIX FOSS technologies with zero trace of Microsoft's money sponsorship, and hinder the students careers in specific job markets, then surely.
People usually never look beyond getting rid of Office and Windows.
> "The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court suddenly couldn't access his email. According to Microsoft, that's because of US sanctions against the court's employees."
Nothing you've listed relates to that.
If American services and platforms have become unreliable and untrustworthy because the American government is erratic, then it's only natural that European organisations will look for alternatives.
DirectX is a funny one to list because 90% of Windows games run on Linux. WINE and Proton solve that problem for you:
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/nearly-90-percen...
"It seems to me like all the things you're doing can and should be automated at a larger scale."
Ten years ago when I recalled this I felt sort of good about the prediction. What I predicted pretty much happened.
That sysadmin guy has become some sort of CIO and seems to be doing well.
I did not anticipate the loss of data sovereignty.
.... and now I'm doing like 50% SRE/devops. Who's the sysadmin now, but without physical control of our data?
The path taken by Blender(propreiety initially to open source) to reach industry lead would to me seem the most viable to make a dent.
In that i think best cost effective options like WPSOffice or Corel Suite , would be a good option.They have the professional usability in the interface and functionality.
Corel is basically leaving the market wide , by mostly collecting rent from lawfirms as they are well taken care of there.Considering they used to have viable Linux options , seems a lack of vision theer to pick up marketshare.
I feel if the TUs were required to dogfood this, especially if generously funded such that startups could come along and provide the same service and support, that it could be a great positive externality
They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.
Apparently the answer is "No." =3
I hate that people are incapable of using Libreoffice and mailing documents around, but modern users are addicted to "the cloud", and it's my understanding there's no EU centric competitor to those two giants.
By injecting CoPilot into it without customer validation is going to be very costly.
I was one of the people fighting for keeping Unix when the UU went to Exchange. It was a drama: instable af, the MS consultants could not keep it running even for 24 hours at a time while unix had 0 issues and kept chugging along (I don't remember what Unix: I think it was SunOS/Solaris). It was forced through at great cost and effort but of course sponsored by MS. It sucked for years to come.
I was at the UvA too when they moved to, equally instable MS stuff too: I worked behind some of the last Sun machines and got to take a palet of sparcstations, ultras and an e450 home when they got phased out (I still have them and they are still working, of course). Could have all been Linux now but MS was so aggressive and no one listened to profs or students, even in all tech deps who were all vehemently against the move.