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Europe is ready to ditch US tech for private alternatives (proton.me)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 36 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (20 children)

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.

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  • [–] 21 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (6 children)

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

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  • [–] 14 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    I think many companies are basically stuck with Microsoft (Excel, Word, Teams, Sharepoint, Onedrive etc).

    Tbh, office and collaboration tools are the least of our worries; there are plenty of good alternatives which, with some financial support, can be adapted to suit companies' needs in very little time. What should worry us more are the tons of critical applications tailored to a very specific area of administration and business. The software that runs the power plants and hospitals. The software that manages logistics and industrialised production. The software that runs our accounting and HR. That's the Windows lock-in that we're not going to shake off over night.

    Oh, that and the hardware vendors + hyperscalers...

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