Re: About time.
If the whole of the EU slung some serious resources at IT maybe we can actually break the stranglehold the US has.
Here we go again. Have you any idea how much resource is required? Basically you’d have to recreate something as good as MS Office, Windows, even Outlook, etc. I know there’s projects like Libreoffice, but frankly that’s just so far behind you may as well start again. And Linux on the desktop remains is so niche it is effectively insignificant.
And that’s before you consider how much stuff has built up inside Microsoft’s ecosystem. All those macros, formulae, Visio drawings.
Like it or loathe it, MS’s stuff is a de facto standard. And to a large extent these days it’s an open standard. If you wanted to clone Office you can, but that’s a really big job. All of MS’s file formats are open, so in principle it can be done, but be prepared to blow billions doing so and supporting it. Plus whilst there’s dozens of disparate Linux distros, Windows and MacOS will continue to be the only OSes you can use en masse across an entire economy’s desktop / laptop user base.
Germany and the EU would be better off using their influence (carrot and stick) to shape MS to their needs. The alternative is to waste time trying to displace them and persuading everyone recreate everything they’ve already produced in MS’s ecosystem in some new, incomplete and no-good-outside-the-EU alternative.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
