Government want to press their puckered lips up to Microsoft's backside, and suck in a deep draft of Coprolite. None of that FOSS nonsense for our government! And as for data sovereignty, what's that?

For the rest of us, we can but drown our sorrows ------------------------------->

Britain is owned by the USA. The king is nothing more than an unelected celebrity with less ability than the sum of the Kardashians.

British politicians number one job and focus is: how much more can we suck up to the USA to pretend we are relevent?

In a fashion I'd agree, but also we do have a tiny sliver of not being the USA's bitch, such as recognising Palestine.

So less totally owned, more like 99%

>recognising Palestine

Its safe to do this now because Palestine doesn't physically exist any more. Our news outlets have been focused on Gaza so haven't been tracking what's been going on in the West Bank.

All this while offering IDF weapons and military intelligence and also arresting anyone who sympathizes with the Palestinian people or what's left of it.

"Government want to press their puckered lips up to Microsoft's backside"

At least they made a better choice with communication and use Matrix/Element instead of Teams. One small step, etc.

Of the distinction between "can't" and "won't"

Given the history of Gov IT projects I would say can't AND won't

Make America Go Away.

Guess Nadella and other brahmins will now ask Trump to scream again against those ugly and evil Europeans... but it's not only the clown-in-chief, the issue, did Nadella believe his "New Outlook" is a great idea to fill MS AI with its users data? And Azure as well?

And killing Windows development as much as he could, is another way to ease switching to something else.

look forward to 100% tariff increases on all imports from |Germany only to be retracted a few hours later.

Trump's mind is mush. Herr Goebbels Miller is running the show these days. Look at the debacle with the Italy PM in Egypt the other day.

The UK is bound to MS like an addict is to their dealer. Well done to the Germans for breaking the monopoly.

Herr Goebbels Miller is running the show these days.

While I agree that Miller and company are running the White House while the elected dotard plays golf and lives in la-la land, I do have to disagree that Miller comes across as a Goebbels clone.

Given Miller's track record on splitting up immigrant families and his apparent desire to rid the US of all coloured people I'd say he is more a re-incarnation of Reinhard Heydrich. He comes across as cold, ruthless and without a shred of humanity.

I always thought Munich switching back to Microsoft and Windows was always a bit questionable at the time. It's true, there was a change in local government between the switch away and the one back, and it's also notable that shortly after the switch back Munich became the location of a major Microsoft office for Europe with all the business taxes that would be paid as a result.

I'm pretty sure that I also heard that there were very significant discounts on the cost of the new MS licences (like, almost free and who knows whether there were plain brown envelopes to selected people as well).

This time around, there is an additional incentive to move away from Windows. It is quite possible that the existing fleet of systems can still be used, rather than being sent to recycling with all of the replacement costs.

I'm still a bit surprised that Microsoft have not come up with a lightweight OS to allow existing PCs that can't (officially) run Windows 11 to be used as access devices to a Cloud PC service. I really expected that to be the path they would choose for business systems, to give companies a (poisoned) choice of replacing their systems and then running Windows 11, or to keep them, embracing more MS cloud services as subscription services.

You can use Linux for that, but I expected an 'official' MS route.

> I always thought Munich switching back to Microsoft and Windows was always a bit questionable at the time.

Yes it was.

In fact my original copy had some hints on this subject, but I can't 100% prove it, so after some discussion with the editor, we removed it.

Munich was facing a bill of ITRO €40M to upgrade to Windows 7 and the corresponding version of MS Office.

The plan was that Linux would be cheaper.

https://archive.ph/jegPI

But Steve Ballmer sent out an order "Stop Linux at any cost" and MS set up what we called a "slush fund" to pay for it.

https://www.theregister.com/2003/05/15/ms_slush_fund_provides_big/

In the end, MS vastly reduced the price of Windows -- contemporary estimates were a 90% discount but I've not been able to find a citation -- and let Munich just licence the bits of Office it wanted, not the whole suite. Mostly that meant just Word, again, allegedly, at a steep discount.

So, Munich went back.

https://www.theregister.com/2017/11/13/munich_committee_says_all_windows_2020/

MS also moved its German HQ back into the city centre.

https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-calls-new-german-headquarters-the-biggest-shift-since-the-industrial-revolution/

Red Hat is also there; I know because I got some training in the RH München HQ.

> Microsoft have not come up with a lightweight OS

It has, several. I've tried them. They're rubbish.

Not very lightweight XP:

https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_Fundamentals_for_Legacy_PCs

Not very lightweight Win7:

https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_Thin_PC

Now, there is Win 10 LTSC, which is actually not bad. No Modern apps, no Windows Store, but again, not much lighter than the full thing.

I wasn't thinking only in terms of cut-down versions of Windows which would still be capable of running local software. I was thinking more along the lines of what used to be called Windows Terminals, not being much use for locally run apps, but instead just a gateway device to a Cloud PC. More like the original Chromebooks, but connecting to a Windows Cloud based service. Make this a simple install to overwrite Windows, or maybe even make it a read-only USB key, with some credential based configuration from a configuration manager which could itself be in the cloud.

Such an OS would not need to have much in the way of Windows APIs, could have very much lower capabilities that any Windows PC, and thus could be smaller with a very much reduced attack surface, and much lower maintenance requirements than any Windows variant.

These various municipal initiatives do show that it is possible to reduce the presence and influence of data slurping Microsoft. These days, I use Softmaker Office for MS compatibility and it works very well.

I hadn't encountered this but looking at their web site https://www.open-xchange.com/products/ox-app-suite-cloud/ox-ai "OX AI in Your Inbox" I can see they have been sipping the same AI lemonade as the rest of industry.

I remember a custom Thunderbird version, TrustedBird was developed by parts of the French government and wasn't half bad although I am not sure that it has been maintained.

Schleswig-Holstein having replaced their office suite and now their email/groupware might now have sufficient momentum to fairly quicky remove residual MS infestations (and those from other US [cloud] services.)

If they can pull this off fairly quickly there is currently sufficient Trump induced political will in the EU to pick up a working Schleswig-Holstein model and run with it.

> I hadn't encountered this

I have mentioned it recently:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/29/dont_even_consider_microsoft/

El Reg has been covering it for 20 years:

https://www.theregister.com/2005/04/05/netlin_open_x-change/

... for me. No issues of any note these last three years. Self-hosted, but how well it scales, I've no idea.

I never knew, but there is an enterprise version with extra knobs on i e. "Microsoft integration", looks like its for places with over 100 users

https://nextcloud.com/all-in-one/

It mainly works for me, but hasn't been entirely pain-free. There was a recent bug which manifested during an upgrade and meant that I had to re-upload all the photos from my phone, and there's a current bug which affects syncing with the Android Nextcloud Notes app.

There is also an active and communicative development team, which makes it miles / kilometres better than Microsoft :-)

Good on them to finally boldly go into the Futur, the one with stability and without endless critical updates that never actually address the underlying pile of crap.

I hope they're not going to pull a Munich and stay the course, domanstrating to an aghast CxO public that, yes, you CAN do without Redmond - even if you have to say goodbye to your favorite Excel charts and PowerPoint presentations.

Life can go on, and it will do so in much better shape when we've all gotten rid of that lodestone stamped with a a Windows icon.