Why has it never been so urgent to drastically reduce dependency on Microsoft?

The geopolitical context changed completely in January 2025 with the arrival of President Trump. Trade war, almost open support for Russia, humiliation of President Zelensky in the Oval Office, virtual isolation from his historic allies Europe and Canada, threat of seizure of a European territory (Greenland) and of Canada to make it the 51st state of the United States, support for far-right candidates...

The United States has lost its historic role as leader of the free world, and its democracy has been replaced by presidential authoritarianism that is open to all possible excesses.

Technology as a means of exerting pressure

So the new American President is stopping at nothing. It is clear that dependence on digital services, weapons or even energy (LNG) from the United States is becoming increasingly risky for European sovereignty and security.

Blackmail has become commonplace within the Trump administration, as we have seen with rare earths for Ukraine, customs duties and, much more worryingly, the (temporary) cutting off of intelligence on the Ukrainian theatre and arms deliveries.

Worse still, this interruption even affected a private company, Maxar, which cut off Ukrainian access to its satellite photos on the orders of the US government. Elon Musk himself spoke on X about cutting off Starlink to the Ukrainians, with catastrophic consequences for them. The Ukrainian military depend on Starlink for battlefield operations, as the supply of the European equivalent (OneWeb, now Eutelsat) is less deployed and as they await the European IRIS2 constellation for 2030.

Another recent example perfectly illustrates this danger: in March 2025, Microsoft suspended access to the email accounts of the President of the International Criminal Court (ICC), against a backdrop of tensions with the US administration (US sanctions on the ICC).

This unilateral measure temporarily paralysed the institution's internal communications and raises a fundamental question about the digital sovereignty of international and European institutions.

Note: the risk is not limited to digital services, but can also be seen in the field of armaments, with the need for the Ukrainians to obtain US validation for American equipment or a European weapons system incorporating US components (ITAR law).

Even the purchase of equipment is subject to pressure. In April, Trump refused to allow Ukraine to purchase several Patriot missile batteries for a total of $50 billion.

Increased risk of data collection/interception

The presidency of G.W. Bush, a much more “moderate” president than Trump, gave the go-ahead for massive interception through the PRISM programme, which was brought to light by Edward Snowden. With all its abuses - eavesdropping on politicians, economic interception - this programme was set up behind the backs of Congress.

Trump, for his part, is already behind the Cloud Act, an extraterritorial law allowing data to be requisitioned from the data centres of American companies abroad.

Recent events reinforce our concerns: General 4* Haugh of the NSA was dismissed in April 2025, despite his skills being widely acclaimed by both Democrats and Republicans; Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is one of the most controversial members of the Trump team, notably taking up the Russian rhetoric on the war in Ukraine, etc.

Data has already been collected from their own agencies, with the new DOGE (Department Of Government Efficiency) agency having exfiltrated 10GB of confidential data from the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) by bypassing all the usual authorisations, disabling control systems and .....

Even more worryingly, according to the New York Times, the sulphurous private company Palantir has been commissioned by Trump to collect US inter-agency information.

With the Cloud Act (judicial) and FISA (intelligence) already posing a major risk, the US tech giants must now either obey or face major reprisals over government contracts. 24 hours after Amazon talked about wanting to indicate the cost of customs duties on invoices, the company had to back down under pressure from the White House. Big Tech bosses, in the front row at Trump's inauguration, have refrained from the slightest criticism since the start of his term of office.

On the other hand, they have multiplied their communication messages on the creation of ‘sovereign’ offers on the European continent, sensing the disastrous consequences of this new American policy.

Permanent price inflation, risk of customs duties

At a time when the global economy is heading for hard times and public finances are in dire straits, buying Microsoft, E1+Teams (12.40EUR excl. VAT) or E3 (28.10 EUR excl. VAT) subscriptions is becoming a financial heresy, even more so for the public sector. To this amount, you would have to add (sic) 30EUR/user and per month to have Copilot AI.

For an organisation with 2,000 agents/collaborators, this comes to an annual budget of EUR 297,600 for the cheapest package (E1), a package that doesn't even allow you to install Office on your workstation.

On top of these exorbitant prices, Microsoft raises its prices by an average of 8% a year, a 40% increase every 5 years... Of course, it is trying to hide certain increases, for example when it separated the marketing of Office 365 and Teams.

Strategic and economic challenges for Europe

In addition to the issues of sovereignty (read “security”) and financial issues (costs), it is also vitally important to redirect our IT investments in Europe, thereby enabling us to develop skilled jobs and, of course, increase growth and GDP on the European continent. According to the ‘Asterès’ study, if 15% of US cloud/software purchases were made in Europe by 2035, we could expect to create more than 463,000 jobs. In concrete terms, at CEO-Vision we recruit on average one new employee (in France) for every 4 GoFAST sold.

Mature alternatives to Microsoft

As a publisher of an alternative to Microsoft, the phrase we hear most often is: ‘a solution to replace Microsoft doesn't exist, it's not possible’.

Often the decision is taken reluctantly, or in extreme cases, such as the CIO of a local authority who had his Microsoft subscription increased by 100% just before its three-year renewal, to €600,000 per year.

However, for those who have taken the plunge, it's clear that it can be done. SharePoint can be very advantageously replaced by GoFAST, but so can Teams and even Office. Similarly, MS-Exchange can be replaced by Bluemind or OX Exchange.

We have several large customers (several thousand employees) for whom we have carried out outbound migrations of millions of files to SharePoint and even Teams (hundreds of teams). Similarly, the replacement of Office by Onlyoffice, although slow in coming, is a fundamental trend among our customers (one of whom has completely replaced Office with Onlyoffice). In fact, 90% of users only use a small part of the functionalities, with Onlyoffice covering the most important uses while maintaining good compatibility. Read about the city of Nanterre's experience in replacing SharePoint with GoFAST.

Even the Windows operating system can now be replaced by a highly professional Linux distribution from Zorin OS, an Irish company. Over time, the applications installed have become Web applications in the browser, making it increasingly difficult to stick to the workstation. On a personal note, even though I've known about Linux distributions for decades, I made the choice to leave Windows for work in the summer of 2024 without any day-to-day problems.

As you can see, it's all a question of courage and sponsorship at the highest level.

Finally, the end of support for Office and Exchange 2016 and 2019, and Windows 10 in autumn 2025 and SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 in summer 2026 provides an excellent opportunity to reduce your IT budget and your dependence on Microsoft and switch to alternatives.

On the financial side, switching to GoFAST can drastically reduce costs:

• Approximately EUR 124,000 in savings / year compared with E1+Teams for 2000 employees with dedicated local SaaS hosting per customer (as a reminder, Microsoft SaaS is shared or ‘multi-tenant’).
• Approx. EUR 500,000 savings / year vs E3+Teams for 2000 employees

The AI part (Mistral), on the other hand, costs very little because the additional cost is per customer and not per user.

Lastly, sovereignty is becoming a major political issue, and defending Microsoft at all costs could cause problems for elected representatives (in the public sector) and perhaps eventually for senior management in the private sector (pressure on costs, image, operational risks).

In addition to Microsoft's astronomical margins (> 40%), the US government has become openly hostile to Europe.

Every euro spent on American digital services “comes back” to us in the form of threatened customs duties, pressure on our regulations such as the DMA/DSA, or the weakening of European security (within NATO or with regard to Ukraine, which is the bulwark of European security).

It really is time to act.

Author- Christopher Potter, President-founder of CEO-Vision