The search for alternatives to American IT services is intensifying as geopolitical unrest grows. TU/e and ICT cooperative SURF are also looking for replacements for Microsoft and Google. However, a…
The International Criminal Court recently banned Microsoft due to concerns about US sanctions. More parties are worried that our data will soon be inaccessible if President Trump tries to assert his power.
In April of this year, Cursor already wrote about the risk of Trump cutting off access to our data. While this is theoretically possible, then-Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Martin de Vries estimated the likelihood of this happening for TU/e to be very small.
Alternatives
Seven months later, the public demand for European data alternatives seems to be growing. Is TU/e now actually looking for a replacement for Microsoft? The answer is partly yes, but not yet institutionally driven.
“Several departments within the university are already testing, for example, Nextcloud – a German cloud solution," says De Jong. "We are also working with educational partner SURF on our own solutions, for example in the field of IT security.”
If there is no comprehensive alternative, the university will try to arrive at a fully-fledged solution through several interventions, so that it can continue without Microsoft. However, the final verdict on the feasibility of this is not yet in order.
Cables
There are other alternatives on the market, such as the German Open Desk, which the International Criminal Court is now switching to. And the European initiative GaiaX, but none of these can replace Microsoft. That IT provider does much more than provide a typing application or manage data in a cloud.
“Besides word processors, Microsoft also has security solutions, cables, servers in data centers, access control, SharePoint, and AI across all of this,” De Jong explains. “So simply replacing Microsoft isn't an option.”
And switching only partially would require a lot of extra administrative work and money, and wouldn't reduce the risk of data blocking. The American giant is the largest supplier of software and services to TU/e.
Consortium
Finding alternatives to Microsoft is something that several universities are considering. That's why Utrecht University, Delft University of Technology, the University of Amsterdam, Erasmus University, and Tilburg University are collaborating in a consortium to develop alternatives.
TU/e is not involved but says it is following the initiative with interest. The collaboration with SURF for the same purpose is broader: all Dutch universities are members.
Building together
De Jong, incidentally, sees both advantages and disadvantages in the interconnectedness of Microsoft's IT services. “On the one hand, it's difficult for all the components to work together. We can't simply pull something out and replace it. That creates dependency. But on the other hand, the system works so well that you don't notice the complexity as a user.”
A future European alternative must be built by countries, governments, and knowledge partners together. “I think we can contribute our knowledge to developing a solution,” says De Jong, referring to the software and hardware expertise within the university. That development will likely take years.
Trade balance
The current systems that dominate the world—Microsoft and Google—were built by billion-dollar companies and further developed for decades. Even if the Netherlands makes every effort now, a fully-fledged alternative won't be readily available. That gives American companies power.
Yet, De Jong believes there's another side to this power struggle between the US and Europe. “The US is hinting that they can cut off our data, but if fear in Europe becomes too great and we leave, it will have a major financial impact on them. The trade balance on services and ICT is actually positive for America: they make a lot of money from European contracts with Microsoft and Google.”
De Jong believes this will prevent US from simply pressing the ‘block access button’. Such a thing causes a lot of unrest, with financial consequences.
This article was translated using AI-assisted tools and reviewed by an editor
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Comments
Awful piece and so incredibly discouraging to hear that this kind of person has influence at such an organization. They must have some personal incentive in one way or another to keep close to the status quo.
Anyone large organization has ever moved away from dependency on US BigTech has done so piece by piece. China is the prime example. They've been decreasing their dependencies every year back from when it was at its highest. Percentage by percentage. This is the way.
> “Besides word processors, Microsoft also has security solutions, cables, servers in data centers, access control, SharePoint, and AI across all of this,” De Jong explains. “So simply replacing Microsoft isn't an option.”
> And switching only partially would require a lot of extra administrative work and money, and wouldn't reduce the risk of data blocking. The American giant is the largest supplier of software and services to TU/e.
I'd be surprised if this article wasn't indirectly written by Microsoft.
By johnwheeler 2025-12-1614:082 reply I think China generally pirates all of our software in the U.S.
By gabrielgio 2025-12-1617:06 That is a common practice. For example, look it up on the history of Swiss Pharma industry. They grew from pirating to enforcer once they got industry lead. I pretty sure we can find examples for US, Japan, India and what not. Only the country on top of a given sector care about enforcing patent.
By deaux 2025-12-171:34 SaaS aren't directly pirateable. And they do so less and less in general, that's my point. 20 years ago, sure, everything was pirated US software. Now they've replaced it piece by piece.
And software is just a small part, the physical world is nuch more importance. There too they've become more independent incrementally.
By jack_tripper 2025-12-1613:341 reply >Awful piece and so incredibly discouraging to hear that this kind of person has influence at such an organization.
That's modern academia for you.
By cholantesh 2025-12-1614:28 The CISO of a university is not an academic; neither is a writer at its student magazine.
People forget that Microsoft was in position to compete because of Gates' and Allen's stellar BASIC. They were hand-picked by IBM because the market loved BASIC to the point of pirating it before that was even a thing. They cared about the product.
In some of the Microsoft lore there seems to be a split between Gates as an "end user" guy and Ballmer as an "enterprise" guy. Despite taking his lumps in the late 2010s, it seems like Ballmer has prevailed as correct in his "enterprise" push. Microsoft has gotten really good at selling over steak dinners. Now Azure and M365 are starting to dominate. This gives Microsoft a strong distribution platform to push crappy initial versions of any would-be competitors to drive them out. They do tend to iterate those into decent products around the 3rd version.
But will people tire of that? I think so. In which case Microsoft will get what's coming.
By renegade-otter 2025-12-1613:212 reply Gates cared about products deeply. This lot? They only care about the shareholder, not the customer, and we all know how that turned out for GE and Boeing. It's a long path, but it's a path of degradation.
I am pretty sure the the file explorer is "slow" because it's doing cloud sync crap in order to collect my data.
By snarfy 2025-12-1614:03 Balmer figured out the most profitable product is compliance sold to governments and other corporations. And Nadella figured out it's more profitable to lease it.
By cholantesh 2025-12-1614:141 reply Considering Gates was instrumental in bringing MS and OpenAI together, I think this is just greatmanning.
By renegade-otter 2025-12-1810:03 Where is this information even coming from?
https://businesschief.com/news/why-bill-gates-warned-microso...
By netdevphoenix 2025-12-1613:082 reply I thought that while Ballmer started the idea, Nadella is the one seen as pivoting the whole company towards the whole cloud first concept
To the point the whole desktop development experience makes us grey hairs miss Balmer.
Nadella would rather sell thin clients into Azure OS mainframe.
By Cyan488 2025-12-1613:47 As someone that (for now) only ever has 2 digits worth of grey hairs at a time, I feel the same.
By neutronicus 2025-12-1614:111 reply It definitely seems like Visual Studio is no longer feeling the love.
IMO Visual Studio presented an incredible opportunity to sell Copilot. Implement a MCP server, give the LLMs in Copilot all the tools available to a human developer to analyze and debug a codebase. Instead it's just a shitty autocomplete you have to turn off in order to get the good, IntelliSense autocomplete working.
Our parent company went hilt-deep into Copilot and ... now they're backing off, because nobody likes it!
I just don't get it. They couldn't get the AI people and the Visual Studio people in a room together? I guess, cynically, probably not, because the AI people aren't on the same continent as the Visual Studio people?
Very frustrating.
You need to jump into VS 2026 for those goodies.
It was so rushed out, that many of the dialog windows on the new settings pane show tiny VS 2022 settings dialogs as popups.
By neutronicus 2025-12-1622:39 Wait, can VS2026 Copilot make tool calls to bring only relevant type and function definitions into Context?
If yes, that would be great! I've been trying to bodge that together with clangd and emacs LSP, but the amount of yak shaving to get clangd actually working on our codebase (on which Visual Studio just works for the most part) is prohibitive for actually accomplishing anything.
Our codebase is millions of line of very non-standard C++ (some automatically translated from Pascal years ago), and single files can get up to 50,000 lines.
So a LLM really needs (just like us human developers!) the ability to skip around and only read the parts that matter.
By piker 2025-12-1613:09 That might be true, but I think Ballmer claims the "Enterprise Agreement" concept where they just tack on everything as available and have a box for every possible product in the EA. [Edit: The note is really more about founders originally in position to influence the company culture.]
By sys_64738 2025-12-1614:45 > People forget that Microsoft was in position to compete because of Gates' and Allen's stellar BASIC. They were hand-picked by IBM because the market loved BASIC to the point of pirating it before that was even a thing. They cared about the product.
I thought the whole MS-DOS thing happened due to Billy's mom being secretary for the law firm that had IBM as a client.
By gabrielgio 2025-12-1614:181 reply > Even if the Netherlands makes every effort now, a fully-fledged alternative won't be readily available.
You don't need to match their product. You have a smaller user base and smaller number of functionally to cover than Microsoft.
> That gives American companies power.
Guess what happens if you don't do anything?
The trend of universities sacrificing long-term sovereignty for minimal short-term savings is concerning. I have observed this in my home country, where the strategic investment in national technology (which would return back to the country) is dismissed in favor of cheaper foreign platforms like Google. This approach naively puts sensitive research and institutional data on external servers, creating vulnerability where access could be compromised[^1].
Hopefully this person does not express the opinion of that university.
[^1]: https://agorarn.com.br/ultimas/google-bloqueia-acesso-ufrn-c...
By jack_tripper 2025-12-1614:43 >The interruption occurred after the institution exceeded the 152.5 terabyte storage limit contracted with the technology giant, which maintains a partnership with UFRN .
152 TB is something nerds self host in closet home labs, no need to tie yourself up to Google. I though people went to google for solutions with much more scale than just 152TB.
I did a quick check and for a name-brand (but not DELL or HPE solution) 200TB self hosted server with redundancy you're looking at 16K USD upfront cost and then you need to add your own maintenance and support costs which shouldn't be too high with Brazil labor costs and university's easy access to (often voluntary) skilled labor.
From what I can gather this is still cheaper than paying Google.
