Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

Anyone large organization has ever moved away from dependency on US BigTech has done so piece by piece. China is the prime example. They've been decreasing their dependencies every year back from when it was at its highest. Percentage by percentage. This is the way.

> “Besides word processors, Microsoft also has security solutions, cables, servers in data centers, access control, SharePoint, and AI across all of this,” De Jong explains. “So simply replacing Microsoft isn't an option.”

> And switching only partially would require a lot of extra administrative work and money, and wouldn't reduce the risk of data blocking. The American giant is the largest supplier of software and services to TU/e.

I'd be surprised if this article wasn't indirectly written by Microsoft.

In some of the Microsoft lore there seems to be a split between Gates as an "end user" guy and Ballmer as an "enterprise" guy. Despite taking his lumps in the late 2010s, it seems like Ballmer has prevailed as correct in his "enterprise" push. Microsoft has gotten really good at selling over steak dinners. Now Azure and M365 are starting to dominate. This gives Microsoft a strong distribution platform to push crappy initial versions of any would-be competitors to drive them out. They do tend to iterate those into decent products around the 3rd version.

But will people tire of that? I think so. In which case Microsoft will get what's coming.

You don't need to match their product. You have a smaller user base and smaller number of functionally to cover than Microsoft.

> That gives American companies power.

Guess what happens if you don't do anything?

The trend of universities sacrificing long-term sovereignty for minimal short-term savings is concerning. I have observed this in my home country, where the strategic investment in national technology (which would return back to the country) is dismissed in favor of cheaper foreign platforms like Google. This approach naively puts sensitive research and institutional data on external servers, creating vulnerability where access could be compromised[^1].

Hopefully this person does not express the opinion of that university.

[^1]: https://agorarn.com.br/ultimas/google-bloqueia-acesso-ufrn-c...

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.

The only possible alternative to the entirety of Microsoft/Google is a European monopoly that is similar in scale. Indeed, such a monopoly does not exist (nor should it). People go to Microsoft and Google because they're already spending money on one product of theirs and there happens to be this completely different product of theirs which you also need as a business user. Sooner or later you end up using 20 completely different products that are "well-integrated" because at no point did you look for an alternative to any of those use cases.

Your job is not to go from 100% reliance on Google/Microsoft to 0% reliance, that'll never happen. Your job is to look at their offerings in isolation and reduce your reliance one product at a time. And yes, paying for 20 products from 20 companies is gonna cost you more when each of them needs to be profitable separately, only monopolies can afford to offer some product at a permanent loss.

What alternative does anyone have?

Come on, that is an University, there are many many students eager to learn the art-of-migration, for free. Migrate away, one by one, department by department if needs be. Disable M$ Excel, give everyone Libreoffice , python, r, or any-other-linux-stuff, and if the professors are so wooden, let the students find a way to replace that wonder.xls with something else. Then repeat with next piece of the entanglement..

But, no, only complaining (a.k.a. need more money)

It's hard to take this seriously given that the ecosystem of alternatives has never been richer, IMO.

Word processing? Notion for web natives; my kids are growing up on Google Docs and Canva and will never know Office.

Email? Same for Gmail vs Outlook.

Messaging? While Microsoft gets a big chunk of the market via bundling Teams, there's Slack and a slew of options on the market for enterprise chat and messaging. They've also been forced to unbundle Teams in the EU market[0]

Cloud? AWS still holds a commanding lead and there are other vendors like Google, Oracle, et al. that offer competitive products.

Operating systems? My kids are growing up on ChromeOS. My dev team is maybe 80% macOS and 20% Linux. All of our software is shipped as Linux containers. The OS that most of us are interacting with is probably made by Google (Android, Android Auto, Android Watch, Google TV) or Apple (iOS, CarPlay, Apple TV) or open source (Linux) and not Microsoft. The OS running most of the software we access via the web is not Windows Server. The database that is backing the majority of those servers is not SQL Server and more likely to be Postgres or MySQL.

AI? Microsoft has aligned themselves with OpenAI, but it's not hard to see that Google is very competitive in this space as is Anthropic not to mention the Chinese teams doing stellar work with model advancement despite (or maybe as a reaction to) Western restrictions on hardware. Microsoft's open source VS Code and Copilot let you pick from a slate of Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI models.

Browsers? Search? Ad platforms? Social media? No, not even close to a monopoly.

Gaming and leisure? Nope.

To be clear, I'm not here to defend Microsoft; I'm voicing my disdain for a very poorly written article that in no way backs up the claim of Microsoft's "monopoly". By all means, please point out Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but do so with evidence and facts -- not your feelings and dated takes from the 90's. Very, very hard to take this seriously without more specifics or context (possible in some narrow context, Microsoft does indeed have a monopoly). At least from my perspective, for Microsoft to survive these days, they have to have at least a decent product at a competitive price; otherwise, there's always a strong competitor in every one of their major profit areas.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

It's a procurement fallacy to let a corporation dictate what features should be there and not.

Second source … is one of the example of a major strategy against this.

This seems much less like a "monopoly" sort of situation and more of a "you explicitly chose to put all of your eggs in one basket" kind of deal.