Make Microsoft pay by switching to European companies for contracts instead!
To be fair, in this case Microsoft is not to blame. They were forced by their government.
Which means we should switch to European companies not out of revenge at Microsoft, but out of the necessity to have digital sovereignty.
Dump microsoft. Choose your own adventure. https://distrowatch.com/
This is for their cloud services, not operating system.
Still, it’s ridiculous that European institutions use Microsoft/Amazon/Google for anything. It should be homegrown and open source all the way.
I agree they should be sourcing local services, but I don’t think there is a service offering that is comparable today. Microsoft’s iron grip on businesses is due to multiple services all working togethor, easily administrated, highly customisable. OS, Entra, Intune, Exchange, Defender for Endpoint, Sharepoint, Teams each are on their own are not that great, but all togethor for a single fee with support (key for businesses) is attractive. An open source, or Eurorpean alternative is likely some years away but I read on Lemmy a few weeks ago of several initiatives that look promising.
That is only half of the story. Decades of propaganda towards making people expect perfection and making them immature and impulse driven is behind microsofts (and other monopolists) totalitarian reign over the corporate and political world.
