[kfk]

The challenge with Microsoft in Europe is that it is so convenient, it doesn’t make business sense to consider alternatives. See how easily MS won market share over Slack (MS Teams) and PowerBI (Tableau / Qlik). They have such a big bundle of services that any single player has to be either amazingly good, or specialized, to win maybe 1-2% of market share. The only way I see Europe doing something about it is antitrust laws that break the bundles.

[fulafel]

The convenience and business sense argument could make sense if the value of a communication platform was small and close to its cost. But it's not. Similarly as it doesn't make business sense to rent the cheapest or easiest to lease office exactly because a good office to your company is more valuable than its cost.

People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality, effecting a large drag on communication. It's also incompatible with effective organizational culture (eg calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions, information is siloed to only meeting participants, cooperative doc editing corrupts and loses data, sharepoint is a psychological horror game etc). Its usage is a useful signal about an organisation though.

And of course it's a giant red target from security POV, as is obvious the headlines on the MS phishing epidemics and regular news on the gaping slapstick level security holes ([0] [1] [2] etc) in the load bearing part of company security (identity, and email password reset channel).

[0] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-critical-...

[1] https://www.hkcert.org/security-bulletin/microsoft-exchange-...

[2] https://digital.nhs.uk/cyber-alerts/2021/cc-3977

[oezi]

People don't hate Teams. It is competitive enough against Zoom and Google Meet (which is the worst of the three) for people to use it for video conferencing.

As a slack competitor Teams is arguably worse, but for people who haven't used Slack the difference is hard to justify switching.

[Kwpolska]

> People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality

People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office (but I personally hate LibreOffice).

> calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions

What? Where? Is this about the list of other calendars defaulting to showing people under the same manager?

> information is siloed to only meeting participants

You can configure it to show meeting titles to everyone (the company I work for expects everyone to do so), and the new Outlook even showed me the meeting description and participants when peeking at someone else's calendar.

[oneshtein]

The problem is that when data is stored in the cloud, I don't have full control over it. My data hold as hostage against me. We need to break up data storage from data processing. Imagine if all your data was stored in a secure, independent location, like a large vault. You could then choose which services could access your data, allowing you to use multiple services simultaneously. Better, if this will be on browser side, where I have full control.

IMHO, small independent providers should unite and develop something like File API, but for web (for a NAS with web interface).

[dijit]

How would that even help?

Are we forgetting decades of office suite incompatibility? The main reason most european companies use Office365 over alternatives is:

1. Fear of retraining

2. Fear of untrodden path

but most crucially:

3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses

[inglor]

Hi, I work for Microsoft (just a dev), all (most?) our apps are actually designed to work with third party compliant hosting with an open protocol called WOPI.

So for example you can use Excel online with Sharepoint/OneDrive (two different hosts btw) but you can also use many maany third party hosts.

Additionally third party tools can programmatically access the first party hosts (like sharepoint).

I don't like Microsoft-esque APIs and the company sure has issues here and there but I doubt you'd get the same level of data privacy with a startup (e.g. everything goes through privacy review, security review, devs can't access customer data, data is separated by region etc)

[flakeoil]

It's not about data, it's about being pre-installed in the OS, being first to market, being the default at school, bundled as an office pack with other tools, networks effects as people already know it it's easier to continue to use it etc. Where the data is stored is secondary.

Most companies have a solution for network storage or cloud storage and most software will function with it. For personal use most people use their local hard disk and others use a cloud provider as a network drive. Or whatever proprietary storage solution the software supports.

[ikekkdcjkfke]

Yes. Data can and will be used against people wether it's petty scamming or political/war operations. If there is uncontrolled prolifiration of personal data it makes this much easier to exploit

[npteljes]

ONLYOFFICE supports this. The webservice they host supports different "storage backends", which can be something they offer, or Dropbox, or your own Nextcloud instance, etc.

[nonrandomstring]

The end of Microsoft in Europe will be its poor security.

These massive integrated bundles of fluffy convenience are cybersecurity death-traps that leak personal data like a rusty bucket. Firms are rightly getting very nervous about massive fines, and blaming MS is not a get-out. With Microsoft unable to reign-in the complexity of their own products they'll lose market share to smaller, more specialised but more secure systems.

Ironically the path to better security for Microsoft would be to partition/split their own products as the anti-monopolists would have them do.

[BlueTemplar]

Well, that, or the executive arms of the EU could stop being in denial about US infocom companies being legal in the EU.

(Or the US could scrap the "Patriot Act" along with shutting down NSA and other 3-letter agencies, but that's even less likely to happen.)

[longhornjs]

The EU has compelled companies to switch to Microsoft — yes, you read that correctly. The EU introduced the GDPR law, which significantly increased the complexity of using third-party services. To minimize this complexity, companies found it more straightforward to consolidate their services with Microsoft, as it facilitates easier compliance with EU GDPR regulations.

Once again, we can thank the EU for pressuring companies to use Microsoft products.

[kaliszad]

That seems like checkbox-compliance theater. Also doesn't seem to be supported by official findings. There are notions that actually you cannot be fully GDPR compliant with Microsoft 365. [0] Therefore state organizations sometimes do migrate to different offerings. [1]

[0] https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/pre... [1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost...