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French City of Lyon Kicks Out Microsoft

(news.itsfoss.com)
56 points buyucu | 2 comments | 05 Jul 25 07:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.436s | source
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notepad0x90 ◴[05 Jul 25 11:41 UTC] No.44472041[source]▶
I don't get the bandwagon here on HN. I'm happy for Lyon and European governments finding solutions that work for them, but like 99% of the world's corporations and governments run on Microsoft software on the desktop side of things.

I've used all the popular chat platforms like slack,matrix, discord or meeting solutions like zoom, goto,etc.. and Teams is by far the most cohesive and consistent experience. I've tried out google office, took a peek at zoho, libreoffice,etc... M365 is by a long margin the best office/document/spreadsheet suite. Even for my own personal use I'd rather use their web-based M365 tools.

Just objectively looking at this, I think I get that MS has been really bad for consumers in the last few years and being flippant with data privacy laws. If that is the reason, then I get it 100%, but quality of product sure isn't it. If I were them, I would just fine MS insane amounts of fines and maybe use the proceeds to fund and support alternative solutions. EU can fine MS whatever they want and MS will comply because of how important the market is to them. I'm also biased there because I'm hoping those fines would help us even by a small measure in the US.

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1. mr_mitm ◴[05 Jul 25 12:05 UTC] No.44472180[source]▶
It's not just that. Microsoft benefits massively from network effects.

So you decide to run your infrastructure on something else. Good luck trying to find a contractor who does anything but Active Directory, MS Office and Exchange. Or try to find admins who have experience setting up keycloak as an alternative identity provider or using ansible to manage the endpoints. They exist, sure, but are much rarer.

If you are a somewhat larger corporation and decide to buy up a shop, they most likely run AD, O365, etc already and merging the IT landscapes will be much easier if you do too.

If you're a small operation of a few dozen people or so, it is soo much easier and probably cheaper to simply sign up to O365 and get the entire suite of email, office, calendar, IM, file sharing, etc, than finding a contractor that manages your IT using all open source software.

Every time this discussion comes up, most people focus on the office suite and perhaps the OS of the workstations, but the business world is much more entrenched with Microsoft products than that.

For the record, I think it's vital to avoid vendor lock-in, and I hope us Europeans manage to do it sooner rather than later, but I'm also afraid many people severely underestimate how hard this is going to be.

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2. number6 ◴[05 Jul 25 17:53 UTC] No.44474363[source]▶
I use Ansible and can run Keycloak and yet I still recommended O365. Initially, I appreciated the convenience and the integrated suite, but I'm starting to regret it.

In recent months, Microsoft's reliability has noticeably declined. At this point, I'm just inches away from switching the entire org to LibreOffice and Fedora.