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Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

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Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#381
post #379

A token gesture. Europe is extremely dependent on foreign tech. I don't see the political will to really change that. I think the main causes are corruption, incompetence, extortion (negotiations on trade, etc.), and short-term thinking of politicians and managers. People did warn them, but they were ignored. They fucked the citizens long-term. Treason. Critical infrastructure, such as energy, healthcare, or train se…

If it can stop Hague prosecutors from having their emails deleted, then it's not exactly a "token" so much as it is a defensive mitigation.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#382

Europe’s reading the room and building exits. They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet. Wero, the digital euro, local infrastructure, all of it points to the same thing: financial sovereignty matters when America looks more like a geopolitical liability. my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should…

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Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#383

Europe’s reading the room and building exits. They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet. Wero, the digital euro, local infrastructure, all of it points to the same thing: financial sovereignty matters when America looks more like a geopolitical liability. my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should…

> They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet. People need to get real here and I've got numbers: Europe is the declining, unstable empire. The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper. Inflation-adjusted, since the 2008 crisis, the Eurozone's GDP barely gr…

> The EU is destroying itself both economically and *culturally*

I understand the former. Can you clarify the details around the later? I hear this often, but the people I hear it from are not the most trustworthy or the most knowledgable.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#384

That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government. If we (Europeans) really mean it - and we should - the top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die. According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to data from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That mus…

> If we (Europeans) really mean it - and we should - the top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die.

This is insane. This is sacrificing the well-being of your constituents to send a (minor) political message. The amount of service degradation (including actual physical health) that you'd put your citizens through would be unbelievable.

Only those who are extraordinarily stupid or outright malicious decide to deprecate important services before first assessing the needs of every dependent on that service, and then ensuring that a full replacement is in place.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#385

Europe’s reading the room and building exits. They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet. Wero, the digital euro, local infrastructure, all of it points to the same thing: financial sovereignty matters when America looks more like a geopolitical liability. my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should…

> They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet. People need to get real here and I've got numbers: Europe is the declining, unstable empire. The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper. Inflation-adjusted, since the 2008 crisis, the Eurozone's GDP barely gr…

Re: "Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire."

If this is reality in Europe, which is perhaps likely, then by comparison, the US has devolved into failed-state status. Better a slow decline than a catastrophic fall into the constitutional/regulatory/legal/technological/scientific abyss.

Even if Europe has insurmountable problems, its best move forward is to decouple strategically from the US, and these days, all things strategic are underpinned by information technology. The fact that Europe (soon to be followed by Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is heading down this path is why the US has hit the panic button[0].

Re: "The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper."

The US may have another president or even another style of president, but that wont stop this migration away from American technological/strategic hegemony; because at this level and at this scale, complete trust by former allies, once lost, will never be regained. The US century is now over.

Thankfully open source software is there as an alternative to that US software. I guess it's no co-incidence that LibreOffice and Linux both have their roots in Europe.

[0]https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#386

Europe’s reading the room and building exits. They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet. Wero, the digital euro, local infrastructure, all of it points to the same thing: financial sovereignty matters when America looks more like a geopolitical liability. my read is that 2026 to 2027 is basically Europe saying, "we should…

Europe has just been catastrophically slow in developing anything related to it's own tech infrastructure. Its doesn't back itself. Given how poor it's responding to things like the Draghi report, I wouldn't anticipate success. Just more flailing around and working groups.

Europe isn't a country, and as such each nation has its own agenda, and political relations.

For bad or worse, not all European national governments see the world through the same glasses.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#387
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, companies are perfectly happy with US companies, as long as the data doesn't leave Europe. This means we have to prove we only store data in European datacenters. I guess that's fine for now, but it would be better if we could get European alternatives to AWS or GCP.

USA companies are subject to us laws, so any data will never be safe. Companies can be gagged, forced to seal their customer data and forced to lie about it, by law !

I'm not sure if it's accurate, but according to the summary on Wikipedia at least, the law "provides mechanisms for the companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they believe the request violates the privacy rights of the foreign country the data is stored in."[0]

If that's accurate, your country's privacy laws would supersede US law. That said, as things are going, it's unlikely that they do.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#388
post #68

I think a move to Open Source would be great in Europe, but only if the governments using the technologies are actively funding their development. This doesn't just mean once-off grants, or a bit of cash donated here and there. I would like to see per-user per-year contributions to the organisations that develop these tools on-par with the current spend going towards Microsoft Cloud products. It can be better than Mi…

I would like to see tech related educational institutions incorporate contributing to open source as part of their curriculum. A lot of these institutions are funded by the government anyway, so it would make sense to support the technology running your country which funds you.

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There will be mountains of existing Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents that would need converting, as well as configured permissions structures and remotely managed laptop configurations that currently are working well Well, they are not working well right now, because they could be rendered inoperable at any moment through Microsoft flipping a switch. That risk is real and has precedent (ICC having their Outlook acces…

How much are you willing to have your taxes go up?

By a lot, if that means I never have to use a Microslop product again ;)

Re: Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)

#390
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of european hosts (e.g. hetzner) and with payments systems the technology is rarely the problem it's the politics. I imagine EPI will have no problem succeeding. The major problem Europe has (mentioned in the draghi report) is with industrial competitiveness and strategy and access to cheap energy. With the former it's not like the US is doing any better though. I dont think anybody in the west even…

Yes, it's glaringly obvious to me that they've been actively suppressing their own tech sector. Feels like a lot of EU politicians owned shares of US tech companies. This effect of politicians making decisions based on what corporate shares they own is ubiquitous now. In the other direction, I even wonder if US threats about Greenland were related to this trend of Denmark moving off US big tech. I feel like the real…

Yeap. I worked in the UK public sector and I watched the UK gov briefly back their own cloud company (Skyscape) then ditch them when they had some minor issues.

Completely captured by US tech

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