Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I completely support not being dependant on a foreign company (or any company at all, standards FTW) and I don't think there should even be a shadow of possibility that an organization like the ICC could be cut off from services due to a foreign directive, but while I have seen it repeated many times, I think the article's opening assertion is not true; https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...

It is very distressing how many organizations have become dependant on Microsoft and the US cloud for core services. I hope that an unintended consequence of the current US administration's approach is that this becomes less so.

I am sure UK universities cannot go without Microsoft. I believe the absolute majority rely on it. And I can see how they rely more and more on it, by stopping using non-Microsoft/local solutions and switching to Microsoft's ones.

When I did a 4 year CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s I don't think I touched anything from Microsoft for the entire time I was there!

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.

> for example, by using its own mail server.

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.

Can Dutch universities do with Microsoft? Genuinely how far gone are we that this is a question?

Microsoft is destroying their monopoly from within. Office 365 was a staple of the global business landscape.

By injecting CoPilot into it without customer validation is going to be very costly.

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

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.

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?

In my 5 years I was basically only allowed to use Microsoft tools. It's one of the most stupid things I've ever seen.

at work I don't need MS at all. It's just used because the IT department prefers it to manage things. I wish we could just use Fedora or Ubuntu.

Oh it's not only Dutch universities.

Dependence on Redmond and Washington (for high-complexity software, national security, and any other "really hard" stuff) is a very easy, comfy local optimum.

Actual independence would require a great deal of competence, expenditure, hard work, long-range planning, and time living unhappily far from any optimum.

While the Dutch obviously know how to do that - nobody in America is keeping the North Sea at bay for them - I would not bet that they'll actually do it here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>to be honest, Microsoft is making it increasingly attractive to switch. Now that the company is putting AI in everything, everything is becoming more annoying to use."

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.

step 2. cost savings by firing them all

step 3. we get locked in

step 4. oh no how did this happen

I mean, what did they do before Microsoft? The Netherlands is a bit older than Microsoft, and so, presumably, is its universities.

An exception to Betteridge's Law! I would love to see more universities move away from proprietary software and opting for open source equivalents.

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Apparently the answer is "No." =3

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The lock-in is around identity services, right?

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.

Depends.

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.