Europe (and the rest of the world!) really needs proper alternatives to Microsoft's cloud offerings!
The wider problem is that when governments and (non-profit) organizations did create alternatives for Microsoft products, the governments themselves ended up showing they are corrupted and the internal rules quickly changed to stop allowing the competing (open source) offerings.
A good example here is the Munich Linux desktop efforts a couple of decades ago. The actual workers were much happier, the sysadmins were ecstatic (much less work) and there wasn't really anyone that had problems with Openoffice and kmail at the time.
Yet, the funding to companies supporting the features they wanted dried up. Requirements got written that disallowed upgrades to "dangerous" new open source releases and after some time they went back to Microsoft because problems were not getting solved. (duh!).
So, sure, we'd need a set of alternatives. But what we really need is not the end-products. What we really need is more honest bureaucrats that actually work for the benefit of the people. And those I have not yet found.
Not just government, also corporations. How many times, has superior product being ignore because it doesn't have some MS/Google/Oracle (fill in the blank). Current politics in the world does NOT support meritocracy. Doesn't matter if in gov or corporate.
There's always some tiny little thing which is missing for someone. If you demand 100% completion before you can switch, you will never switch.
> we need to fund their improvement, and use them once they are ready
That would mean funding for a long time, without getting any tangible results (since you refuse to use it until it's "ready") until the very end. The end result would be that the funding is abandoned after a while, and you never switch.
I once worked for a company that was building among other things a videoconference app. The quality of the product only really started to increase when employees were sent home during covid and they started using their own tool.
(And MS/Google can just use their deep pockets to make an offer you can’t refuse, or to lobby against you, or both.)
It is unrealistic to play catch-up with Microsoft, let alone exceed their current pace of development.
If tools were "easy", ReactOS would be beyond the NT4 era.
Drupal is already the default CMS in EU institutions and it can replace Sharepoint and Microsoft Word, but this requires a massive change of workflows, breaking of habits and quite some training.
git (yes, git) can be use by Publications Office to track recitals and publish directives.
It's just a matter of concerted work together against the dominance of US IT companies.
It will be hard.
But possible.
The first move is to ban Active Directory. Without it, the house of Microsoft cards will fall apart in a decade.
Are you familiar with SharePoint? Drupal and SharePoint are not the same.
Word, especially co-authoring, can't be replaced. LibreOffice/OpenOffice are not alternatives.
> git (yes, git)
This is unfortunately what engineers think an appropriate UX is for end users. It isn't. git is far too complex, too convoluted, and doesn't bring SharePoint's strong advantages for Office-related content.
It isn't possible. Simply is not. Google demonstrates it isn't possible.
> The first move is to ban Active Directory. Without it, the house of Microsoft cards will fall apart in a decade.
AD is not required for M365.
This is exactly my point. Replacing Word is impossible, because you will always have a worse version of Word. Libre Office demonstrates it pretty clearly.
Reorganizing work so that Word falls out of use is totally possible and even desirable as a long-term strategy.
Lots of people here talk about collaboration, but how many actually worked on documents where every word matters and sidenotes are important?
Are you aware of state of the art collaborative tools, like those offered by genious.com?
Or stet, for that matter?
See stet used in https://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gplv3-draft-1.html
So is commercial fusion power. And between commercial fusion and the reorganization of work so that Word falls out of use, commercial fusion is likely to happen decades sooner.
My users work on documents that enable others to save lives. Yes, they matter. Far more than a license document.
Not always practical, especially in older companies.