Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

It was much easier in 1980's, unless you would be using CP/M or MS-DOS.

Because for a CS degree students are expected to work with other systems and the software needed to complete the course work is usually low level. Even when I did my CS degree 20 years ago our labs were Linux and Solaris.

For other degrees you need software which only runs on Windows.

It might also help that Microsoft was totally irrelevant in the professional world in the 80s.

I am pretty sure you wouldn't have touched anything from google and meta as well.

same for me in the 2000s

unfortunately the university has gone full MS since then

"Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity. Yes, we have European Union which helps a lot, but it is not complete (and certainly wasn't in the time when Microsofts and Googles of this world started), making that all-important initial scaling way more difficult than it is in the US.

AI is gonna be even worse. At least there's some competition from scandinavia and germany and france's tech scenes. For AI there's basically none.

EU is in a really tough situation. They're getting squeezed on all sides economically by USA and China while also facing a belligerent Russia on their eastern borders. And their internal politics and governance makes it very difficult to align in a direction that could enable them to start digging out of so much globalized dependence.

It feels like an emphasis has been placed more on legislating or policing what other people make rather than making anything of value themselves (as far as tech goes).

Being a barnacle on the side of a boat might be a nice free ride for a while until it goes somewhere you don't want to.

> moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.

Until you have companies trying to intervene.

If Universities are publicly funded by the government, and those companies do stuff like spying on, or silencing public officials, then why should the government finance those companies?

I think its nuts that the EU has seen spying, access from services taken away, yet continues to fund those foreign companies. Are the Open Source alternatives worse? Would change suck even if the alternatives were better? It doesn't matter really. It makes no sense to pay to keep your bad deal running.

Red Hat is IBM, the OG big tech really

Governments also don't move to open standards because open standards doesn't have a hospitality suite to invite them to at football matches or Cheltenham.

One of the most remarkable things in British politics in the last 25 years went almost unremarked upon, in part because it happened in a reactionary way.

Blair/Brown's New Labour got so deeply into bed with Microsoft that it caused the coalition government that replaced them to develop a point of agreement and move government functions off Microsoft to open standard formats, and that change stuck. Hence this weird little country that has so many problems has accidentally good IT for anything that they rolled out, there's a lot of open data etc. etc.

That would never have happened if their decision was being guided only by lobbyists; it happened that it was so strengthened by the major tech giants working with the other side.

EU governments can absolutely do this; I find it difficult to believe universities cannot.

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 like Nextcloud to provide your own privately hosted cloud backend. But obviously this is a gigantic effort for the university's IT department to provide and maintain with reliable redundancies and backups.

Also, LibreOffice/Collabora is pretty good if you stick to its native formats, but its interoperability with MS Office files has a lot of bugs.

In the end, it's just cheaper and more reliable to use MS or Google like everyone else. Students, professors and administrators wind up having basically the same needs around office software as businesses do.

And it certainly would not survive strong political pressure from the EU and US governments. Local governments still can be adversely impacted.

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

As long as there's any American ownership in the chain, this is not to be trusted.

I'm assuming AWS wouldn't fully divest from this European business unit and split it off as a completely separate entity?

The problem is that we already can provide an alternative, but we don't switch to them. Which might be even worse.

Familiarity, convenience and habit.

Familiarity: "I've used MS Word/Excel/Teams before so I can use it here"

Convenience: "We have MS Entra, might as well go all-in"

Habit: "We never really investigated alternatives, this is just what 'everyone' uses."