The way Denmark works is that at some point an inflection point will be hit - I think about 30% of computers being off MS, and then there will be a stampede and everyone will be off MS in the year.
If they started to actually build their own infrastructure 10 years ago, we would probably have very advanced and secure government OS and tools complementing usual use cases.
China did it because it is capable. I am not yet convinced that Europe will not bungle it again. In recent times talking 2 minutes about technical issues is too much mental strain for a lot of people that need to make decisions.
You don't have to be a geek to understand these issues, just some basic critical thinking skills would suffice. There is also risk here, but it should be easy to mitigate that. Also, people need training to use different applications.
Please note that only ~79 employees will be affected by this decision, which, taken in context, looks a lot like just political posturing in preparation for "Folkemødet" the week-long politician+lobbyist festival going on this week.
So many of the comments are focusing on Office products. Okay, that’s fair. People can talk Calc vs Excel for example, and that’s fair. What I don’t get is how you replicate knowledge worker collaboration without using a major commercial provider like Google Workspace or M365. How do you handle the use cases solved by collaborative document editing, SharePoint / OneDrive, Teams with DLP, document classification, etc.
I’m not affiliated with Google or MSFT, just genuinely curious how you replace the broader ecosystem around the core Office products using open-source solutions. Has anybody solved for this?
Spændende! Det bliver interessant at se, om det lykkes at mindske afhængigheden af Microsoft. Håber virkelig, Libre Office kan leve op til forventningerne.
phasing out Microsoft products is not hard. the only real difficulty is that corporate IT departs are populated with people who have built their entire careers on the Microsoft ecosystem and can't imagine a world beyond Microsoft.
That is out of touch for professional users. There is nothing on the planet that competes with Excel. Sure there is spreadsheet software, but nothing that has all of the power and features that experts expect.
It would be like if your manager came in and said, “We are switching away from your expensive jetbrains IDE. You can just use notepad, right?”
Can confirm that I will take Excel from the cold dead hands of our CFO (and the rest of his dept). Hell even macOS Excel is too much weirdness for them. And being user of both platforms I agree with them.
The rest of the company are very happy though on Google Worksheets, making lists and replying to RFP requests in .xlsx, on their Macbook.
We do a survey every year; 95% of staff is happy with the resources out at their disposition. Including those working on a platform that is not their native platform.
End users are more flexible than we think. Especially non technical ones.
Imagine a world where if experts didn’t spend hundreds of hours learning the non transferable skills of VBA macros and Power-Noun integrations, but rather they spent the much less time developing a basic understanding of scripting and prompting and managed tabular data in ways vastly more powerful than excel in a way that is transparent and debugable. Would we not be much better off? Excel is not an engine of progress. It is an anchor.
Excel is powerful? Does it do forecasting, statistics or machine learning? Only in a rudimentary sense. Spreadsheets like Excel are low-code tools. Experts in those domains use a real programming language.
People use Excel because it is familiar, because it has distribution. They don't (care to) know any alternatives. If they'd never been familiar with Excel they wouldn't ask for it.
True. It is already happened at least once in Germany that a municipality decided to ditch MS products in favour of open source, and went back after people started complaining that buttons are in the wrong places.
you don't need to replace them. retraining them is pretty easy. but these people have invested their careers in the microsoft ecosystem, and will not initiate this kind of change on their own. they need to be pushed.
Readit News
Now I'm somewhat shocked that a government is still stuck on Microsoft products.
All of this will be forgotten when the orange monkey is gone.
So if it has to happen it has to happen yesterday.
China did it because it is capable. I am not yet convinced that Europe will not bungle it again. In recent times talking 2 minutes about technical issues is too much mental strain for a lot of people that need to make decisions.
You don't have to be a geek to understand these issues, just some basic critical thinking skills would suffice. There is also risk here, but it should be easy to mitigate that. Also, people need training to use different applications.
they save money in the process, switching to a non-american based cloud provider.
Both works pretty well
It would be like if your manager came in and said, “We are switching away from your expensive jetbrains IDE. You can just use notepad, right?”
Can confirm that I will take Excel from the cold dead hands of our CFO (and the rest of his dept). Hell even macOS Excel is too much weirdness for them. And being user of both platforms I agree with them.
The rest of the company are very happy though on Google Worksheets, making lists and replying to RFP requests in .xlsx, on their Macbook.
We do a survey every year; 95% of staff is happy with the resources out at their disposition. Including those working on a platform that is not their native platform.
End users are more flexible than we think. Especially non technical ones.
Debatable. Even then, why that matters? I would think 90% of the world population never used Excel anyway.
> You can just use notepad, right?
No, you are missing the point. Intentionally.
People use Excel because it is familiar, because it has distribution. They don't (care to) know any alternatives. If they'd never been familiar with Excel they wouldn't ask for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
It was about many things.
So it can't be the reason.
Kinda dishonest framing there.
Or at least train them and get them to buy into a different platform.