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Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

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Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#321

Post by wiether »

another_twist wrote: post #274
mcv wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mea…

Dont know why employers do this. Why pay for shitty tools your employees hate ?

Corporate people who decide what services to buy don't care about what the employees think about those services.

And regarding Microsoft, it's easy: paying for the whole package is much easier in terms of contract overhead and with MS the discounts are quite advantageous as soon as you increase the width of the package.

Short term and if you only look at the bill, it makes sense.

Long term, forcing your teams to work with shitty services is a terrible idea.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#322

Post by tester756 »

tfourb wrote: post #225
BenFranklin100 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because outside of a handful of nerdy tech companies, all small businesses need to use Microsoft Office. From there, it’s a no brainer to stay in the MS ecosystem and use Sharepoint etc… For a small business without a dedicated IT team, simply hire a IT contractor to harden the tenant (MFA etc…), have them review every six months and be done with it and focus your resources on running your business.

My father’s decidedly non-nerdy logistics consulting business with roughly 20 employees ran (and runs) on Mac OS since the founding of the company in the mid 1990s with my mom being the „IT team“. There are some situations where companies rely on certain compatibilities requiring windows. But most could do completely fine without, especially nowadays.

It's not proof of anything

How do you know that they wouldnt be more productive if they were using Windows and Office bundle all the time?

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#323

Post by nikvaes »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #57
crazygringo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer: to Google it's not so bad but it's not like the legal risks are any different from Microsoft. And to the rest -- yes it is very hard. Universities need cloud storage with online collaboration and a fully functioning office suite. LibreOffice doesn't work because it's desktop-only and has no collaboration. However, there's an online-collaboration fork called Collabora Online, and you can use something li…

How much is the typical dutch university paying MS/Google? Maybe 10k students x 200EUR/year = 2 million EUR/year. Twenty universities come together to move to make Collabora+NextCloud work for them. That's 40 million EUR/year. How much do they need to actually spend on developers + infrastructure to make it happen?

they already do that, it's called SURF, and they host a nextcloud instance called surfdrive.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#324

Post by vanviegen »

thenthenthen wrote: post #297

In my experience it went something like this: Before covid it seemed to be run mainly locally, during covid there was a massive lobby by MS to push teams and most Unis caved and thats how most unis ended up in the MS eco system.

Yes, this is what happened. 'The only way' to scale up Teams video conferencing such that everybody could use it, was to move everything to the cloud. Never waste a good crisis!

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#325

Post by Havoc »

ttkari wrote: post #13
t0mas88 wrote: post #3

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.

I'm not sure I understand how an American company would be able to provide any service that could be "sovereign European".

The Microsoft effort was not terrible - run by EU nationals etc but yeah calling it sovereign is optimistic.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#326

Post by rat9988 »

greatgib wrote: post #311
tester756 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual Studio is world class IDE, C# is one of the better designed languages and ecosystems, Windows is everywhere - from home, to enterprise.

Visual studio code sucks badly, just most common developers started with it and are used to it in the same way that Windows was "the os" for the same kind of developers at a specific point in the past. It is even worse know that vscode and all the clones are packed with llm agents that such devs can't live without. For one thing for example, the latency of the editor is crazy for someone that worked with native edito…

Nobody is talking about VS code though.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#327

Post by nxor »

mistrial9 wrote: post #133
TulliusCicero wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but it's also a fixable problem. The issue I've seen is that there isn't really the political will to fix it. Europeans broadly seem uncomfortable giving up national sovereignty when it comes to digital issues (including those that impact scaling businesses), so they implicitly choose the status quo that makes it hard for software/internet businesses to succeed. Literally in this thread you can see Euro…

on the other hand, the USA got mass surveillance normalized, and an entire generation with serious emotional disturbances due to social media.. Many indicators of required cell phone IDs and airport biometrics still on the way. Is that a "win" in the long term?

Europeans also use social media.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#328

Post by nxor »

saubeidl wrote: post #303
spragl wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity > >It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it. > >Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans. OK, let us play this game... China, Japan, Taiwan and the Koreas "really needs to be" a single entity. Theyre all East Asian. USA, Canada and Mexico "really needs to be" a single entity. Theyre all North Americans.…

China and the US are the two superpowers right now. Together, they are of about the same scale as a united Europe. If we want to play in the same league as them and not be subjugated by them, uniting is our only way forward. United we stand, divided we fall.

China has much more people.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#329

Post by nxor »

canyp wrote: post #151
freehorse wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe is too heterogeneous. What you see as europe is not what others may see as europe.

It always struck me funny how Americans refer to it as "Europe". Like, "I traveled to Europe this summer"; what does that even mean, lol. It's like their country's land mass is so large that they intuitively assume that other entities must have a large mass too, and see homogeneity where there is none.

Europeans also use the word Europe.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#330

Post by nxor »

machomaster wrote: post #219
canyp wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always struck me funny how Americans refer to it as "Europe". Like, "I traveled to Europe this summer"; what does that even mean, lol. It's like their country's land mass is so large that they intuitively assume that other entities must have a large mass too, and see homogeneity where there is none.

It would be like Russians traveling to America, but making no distinction between Canada and Mexico. Except that Russians don't do that. This is an entirely and purely American problem.

This analogy makes no sense.
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