There is an urgent need for Europe to regain its technological independence when it comes to core technologies such as office applications and other productivity tools. As boring as these may seem, they are actually a critical point of failure and over time represent not just a liability but a huge cost sink. A single company (Microsoft, MSFT) has had the world in a technological and economic stranglehold for decades now, first with its legacy productivity tools and now with its cloudified version – extracting many billions of Euro’s of public and private money in the process. This while the company has a long track record of convictions worldwide for violating privacy regulations, as well as engaging in bribery and anticompetitive behaviour.
This is just not acceptable: the products in question are certainly not rocket science, using them poses significant operational risks and is overly expensive. A country or organisation that fundamentally cannot run its basic internal infrastructure anywhere outside of a single black box and does not have any fallback, puts itself at grave risk. Plus, innovation is happening througout the digital commons ecosystem already, and we can benefit from some of the best minds of the world working on creating new tools that will enhance our productivity.
The European Commission’s own administration went to court against the European Data Protection Supervisor after the Supervisor said that using Microsoft 365 breaks EU data-protection law. The right next step is the opposite of a lawsuit: treat leaving Microsoft as a top job, and put steady public money into free office tools.
This lock-in is not a technical necessity. For most work, a switch is possible today. Office software is too important to leave to a handful of vendors. Even a small share of what is now spent on Microsoft licences would pay for better commons tools, at lower cost. There is still no dedicated budget for that — only small grants from open calls at NLnet under Next Generation Internet. The need will not go away. A long-term plan is how we get out of this debt and make everyday work run better.