Forget the migration costs just to develop and standup the cost and infra would be a few billion euros just for one O365 app. I don't think people understand how much O365 apps are used. Nobody is filing github issues either with this, you need to do commercial and customer support, basically replace a core MS SaaS product but not with some shitty idealistic hack because the economic consequences are dire!
Investments in that area would be investment into European open source development as a whole and European IT in general. Businesses can spring up around such efforts, people can find employment, technology can be developed, and the European market could be strengthened.
Why haven’t Europeans been able to be successful in this area already? It’s not like there aren’t always European businesses working on this problem.
It is striking that both the evil empire solution (Microsoft 365) and the underdog disruptive upstart (Google Docs, at least that’s what it was ~15 years ago) are both American companies. iWork is American, Zoho is Indian.
The problem with the MS products is a different one.
All authorities and almost all business are in tight vendor lock-in when it comes to US software. That's a powerful factor. You can't escape 30+ years of grown lock-in without "insane" investments.
The second factor is of course the corruption all across the EU and its authorities.
Ever heard the story of Munich's switch to Linux and than back to MS? "By chance" MS built its German headquarter in Munich right after that… (Of course hundreds of millions of Euros where in play there). And the sister of one of the lead politicians behind that is "by chance" working for MS in a high management role. There are also known buddy connections between the ex mayor of Munich and MS.
Just 4 examples from Germany. There are countless software companies in Europe, and not just western...eastern Europe is going big in IT in some areas as well. The ability is certainly there.
As to why that didn't (yet) result in good EU-centric alternatives to some of the big US providers in certain areas of IT...good question. I think the correct answer will be a mix of startup culture, government appreciation for the topics importance, convenience of existing solutions, marketing, and several other topics. Certainly not an easy question to give an answer to.
Back before Gmail ate the world there were a number of small “mail server with webmail” in a box setups - those mostly died off. Similar things happened with office suites.
And now the document foundation, which is behind LibreOffice (the active fork of the dead OpenOffice) is also german based. And they put a lot of work into it, also the modernisation.
But to be honest, I am not sure, if they could ever become a serious competition. I think they would have to do a fresh UI start and be 100 microsoft office compatible. Then they would have a chance. With more official backing, this is maybe remotely possible, but I do not count on it. Rather political pressure for a slight modification for Microsofts operations for germany.
EU market would also weaken because they lose the competitive advantage of O365, even google workspace would be better. O365 (or its replacement) is as important as diesel and gasoline to the economy!
Are business allowed to use M365 if all of this open source investment fails to produce an equal-or-better solution? Or are businesses forced to operate with the result even if it’s terrible?
I’ll take the strawman. Of course, the software would not be forced upon businesses. Commercial solutions that protect people’s data properly should be perfectly fine to use. I’d even expect many proprietary solutions to come up that solve niche use cases or provide a more polished UX/UI.
Let me put put it another way, that's just the start. You would effectively need the EU to operate a SaaS service and compete against MS. The money is hardly the issue, you can't just throw money at it or say the magic phrase "open source" it isn't for a lack of money that libreoffice is nowhere near excel for example, tech people would actually say it is pretty good without knowing how these apps are used.
It is the digital equivalent of replacing all cars of a certain make that everyone uses for critical business functions and replacing them with your own line of cars that will take a decade plus to even mature after you spent a ton of money and an army of devs and dev-support/mgrs.
A few billion is no problem. Simply collect the GDPR defined maximum fine of 4% of total global revenue from Microsoft, and use that to build the alternative. Provide that solution for self-hosting, so the cost of the infrastructure is payed for by the user organizations.
Why would Microsoft (or Google, or anyone) continue to operate in Europe in that model? Seems like a recipe to go from an imperfect tech solution to none at all.
Because there is a market in Europe they can service.
Microsoft and Google are not shoestring budget bootstrapped startups - they can afford to run multiple products, or multiple variants of the same product adjusted for market need, and they will do it, as long as it's net profitable for them. Sure, it's nicer to earn X than X/2 or X/10, but as long as it's a positive amount, it's still worth doing.
That is, as long as it's more profitable to do it by the books than what a lot of industry players did so far, which is to spend money on malicious compliance and sabotaging GDPR.
The calculus changes when you’re being fined tens of billions of dollars that will be used to develop a competitor to your core product.
It’s not (X/2), it’s (X/2) - (NPV of future profits from giving X/2 to develop competition).
Your model would work for just an adaptation to a compliant product, but not to the proposed “just seize 4% of their global revenue and use that to fund a competitor” model that I was replying to.
