Europe is living under Microsoft’s digital killswitch
The thing people in technology forget is that the most expensive resource in government is the people who work there. Every person in my IT department is top of their game, everyone of them has been continually honing their skill sets and are following their interests.<p>This has put us a head of a lot of other municipalities and a lot of private companies. We&#x27;ve had to send ADFS and Azure consultants back because our crew was better, as an example.<p>Those people live and breathe Microsoft. Those people are the reason we didn&#x27;t have to renew our server room, when we decided to go own-cloud in a major hosting center instead, and they are they reason we&#x27;ll soon be able to move our cloud from rental to Azure.<p>Sure we could have used other technologies for it, but it would cost an unimaginable amount of money to replace the entire IT-workforce. I&#x27;m certain we could retrain our current staff, but a lot of them wouldn&#x27;t want to, because the truth is, if they wanted to be working with non-Microsoft technologies then they would have been snatched up by our &quot;competition&quot; already.<p>I think open source should play an important role in government, and I think that role should increase steadily going forward, but I also think people and reason should come before an ideology.<p>With 370 different IT-systems of various magnitude we already have some that run on Linux. JBOSS and Wildfly are big in government, but out of our entire system portfolio only a fraction of the systems even have non-Microsoft alternatives. Other systems are on 8 year contracts, making it impossible to swap them out overnight even if we wanted to. Which we don&#x27;t because we would need to replace every system, and get every employee on board with open source alternatives in order to save the insignificant Microsoft licensing fees which make up less than 1% of our IT budget.<p>Sure, Europe is bound to Microsoft and that can be problematic. What if Trump truly goes apeshit for instance? Then we would be royally fucked. The truth is that there is no viable alternative that won&#x27;t be ridiculously exoensive and take up to 50 years to fully implement.<p>With everything heading for the cloud it might not even make sense. The only cloud options for a huge part of the European public sector are labeled with Google, Amazaon or Azure - and none of them would make the legislative challenges or licenses any less of an issue. At least with Microsoft, we have a company who has been really open to quickly and efficiently meeting European demands.