The title rubs me the wrong way. "Private alternatives" implies the US tech isn't privately owned.

I think you misread it. "Private", as in "privacy".

Well, get to it then! Ain't got all year.

Yeah

I agree with the misworded commenter

Europe ditches US Based tech and software for stuff they control, so they can better enforce their insane privacy invasion laws better more like

Let's not forget most of the swill age verification legislation around the globe is originating from the EU, and that privacy/encryption focused software groups are fleeing the region (see proton) due to their mallegislation

Proton is leaving Switzerland afaik, to operate in the EU. You’re not wrong about the shit the EU is trying to pull with mass surveillance and de-anonymization. Yeae fornyear it geta struck down by courts, but the fuckers try and try.

The company is private, but your data isn't.

I think many companies are basically stuck with Microsoft (Excel, Word, Teams, Sharepoint, Onedrive etc). Switching to something else is going to be a pretty serious project. It's going to be expensive and time consuming.

Totally worth doing IMO, but convincing the CEO is another matter. I guess we need a cautionary tale before the executives decide to reserve a few million euros for rebuilding a significant part of the IT infrastructure.

Still, the title is misdirected, and it sounds like Proton trying to do marketing.

Neither is it true that Europe is ready yet (most companies are stuck with MS products like the other commenter said) nor are all those who want to switch looking for privacy (but rather more independence from US).

It'll help when governments stop accepting or just blocking links to onedrive and sharepoint, and file formats that are not open. Then companies are forced into using alternatives instead of just blindly using microsoft, or don't work for any government project again.

Please do, hurt these tech Oligarchs where it hurts!

I think its great that Europe is looking to rely less on US tech but nothing about whats going on with Europe (especially within the EU) makes me think privacy is a focus.

Excel is the biggest hurdle to overcome. No other spreadsheet software comes close to providing the same amount of features and functionality.

Now there’s a business opportunity. When companies are that screwed, they’ll start the project immediately. That’s when system migration consults get rich.

Can confirm! Calc is fine as long as you’re not trying to do anything too advanced. Then again, when you bump into those limits, you might want to consider switching to R or Python anyway. Excel just allows you to delay that inevitability a little bit longer.

This is the real thing of it. By the time you reach that you shouldn't be using a damn spreadsheet program.

At least for greenfield set it up right now. There's plenty of actual programs that do things theyre supposed to.

And a lot of people don't need all those features.

This is the main problem, changing the infrastructure in companies which use Windows, Certainly Microsoft EU is way more privacy focused (forced by law) than Microsoft US which use even keyloggers and sharing data with Towerdata and a lot of others.
But this, even so, companies and administrations use more and more alternatives to Windows apps and services
The EU has tons of good and even better alternatives to those from US corps, it's not a tecnical problem, but an political and burocratic one for companies and administrations to change, not so for the normal user, who can easily change his setup to his like from a huge catalogue of EU soft and services.

oh god.... we have built everything on microsoft stuff and the higher ups insist that anything that legally can be hosted on the cloud be migrated to azure. This will cause us (the actual workers) untold levels of pain if it were mandated by the eu.

I still wish it does become mandatory though

Not even the GDPR?

It will never happen as long as slugs like van der Leyen or Merz are running the show. These people are completely incompetent.

Convincing CEOs is not our job. In general they have neither the obligation nor the habbit to take anything else other than their KPIs into consideration. Convincing elected polititians to legistlate is our job.

Some know already, some will bow to reason, many will do whatever keeps them elected. People will need to re-learn to play the long game.

So I keep hearing... Yet, I'm having a hard time believing that most people are even aware of those fancy features, let alone use any of them.

I accept that there are important models implemented as excel sheets. Reimplementing or even attempting to migrate away is viewed as risk. But this is a different argument.

Yeah? Because Chat Control is still a thing. And age verification as well, but the EU won't outsource that to 3rd parties (we have EIDAS and the EU wallet for that).

No.

Merz and von der Leyen are extremely competent, they just don't pursue the goals they say they do. They may even belief that they are pursuing other goals than they really do.

They believe in trickle down economics despite all evidence pointing to it making everything worse. In their pursuit of economic growth, they do the exact thing that in their model should boost, but in reality stifles growth. They increase the wealth redistribution from the poor and middle class to the rich.

And they are so damn good at it. That's the reason money has put them in their current positions.

They are extremely competent in doing the wrong thing.

don't talk about it… do it!

Meanwhile, my employer decided to switch from a self made Linux platform (with it's pitfalls due to the usual "it's free, why should we put so much money into maintenance" reasoning) to Microslop. I and multiple other people warned them, again and again.

Proton is awesome! I can't say enough good things about them.

Just have companies get tax reductions if they use EU only software. Voila, it’s done within months - to the shock of every it- admin out there.

I totally agree with you. Politics is the correct arena for this.

Those who work at the IT department of a company have some authority in this matter too, and they can convince the executives to channel the resources for the migration. If you're in any other part of the organization tree, your words have less weight.

If laws are written first, and companies react after that, it's not going to be a very smooth landing, but I still think this is the most likely outcome. Ideally, smart IT people in various companies would bring this up as a potential risk to daily operations. This way, companies would have more time to react before the laws are enforced.

My guess is, most executives won't give any money to a migration project of this magnitude unless the future of the company depends on it. There needs to be some sort of impending doom in the horizon, before they start reacting. Maybe massive fines or a total collapse of the IT infrastructure would do it.

I mean, you can run python (or their own language "LibreOffice Basic") from within a Libreoffice Calc sheet.

Calc's scripting is actually more powerful than the aging VBA thing Excel uses for macros, imho.

Europe is not ready for what that will cost.

Sure it is. It's the US that's not ready for what it will cost...

I just wish that the narrative would focus more on the anti-competitive behavior of these firms to make sure we don’t fall into the same monopolistic trap in Europe. We need variety, we need competition. Focus on standards, low switching costs, and allow reverse engineering.

Sadly, besides the bottom line, the only universally relaible motivator for an organization is legislation.

i'm sorry you have a typo, "the west" is not written "the globe"

If they put all the effort they use to change things in favor of ai to migrate to software alternatives, it would be a perfectly viable project

France is switching from Microsoft Office to Libre Office right now for government employees, and it's saving them money in licensing fees.

Once the transition is finished, they're projected to save millions each year from just that switch

Wasn't Europe going full open source?

Europe is not ready for what that will cost.

True. But it will be okay. They can find somewhere else to spend all the money they save.

France is.
The EU is working on trying to get EU-made solutions in use.
Switzerland is not in the EU and neither is the UK.

Now that we established this, we can have a productive conversation.

Not Bavaria 🙄

FYI, Proton CEO also caught flak for praising Trump picks, so they are playing both sides of the field FYI

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much reschooling. Projects for making adjustments. How will they do data compliance now? They’ve relied SharePoint for so long. Will they go back to sharing final_final.doc?

Yep. Money steers the decision making process. Politics determines how money works, and companies just go with the flow.

Very interesting... I guess my calculations can be supercharged while still technically remaining in the realm of a spreadsheet.

Hopefully Python still runs with its usual consistency. VBA is a total nightmare in this regard. The code can randomly throw some useless error for no obvious reason. You can run the same code a few hours later and everything works perfectly even though you didn't change anything. Can't really use anything that unstable for anything serious.

If there's a way around the legislation, they'll definitely take it. If you know of an exploit in the system or if you're best buddies with the local king, laws suddenly cease to matter.

Likewise, climate change isn't really a technological problem. Governments don't motivate companies stop destroying the planet, so they don't. Obviously, there are some technological issues too, but for the most part, it's a political issue.

Mentally ready. Actually not ready at all.

GDPR is nice and all, but people have been fighting chat control and all its hydra heads for years now, so no.

But I'm an American so what do I know?