IT guy here, since more and more services have moved to be web based services rather than being local programs means that we need less policy management for local machines, this finally loosen the grip that Microsoft has had on the market through Active Directory and 365.

It is still needed, but to a lesser extent, which opens the door for competitors, and new concepts.

As an IT guy who started just before the big cloud shift I miss on-prem hardware, but the cloud has definately opened new concepts that Europe can use to take back our infrastructure from the claws of the US tech sector and bring it home.

I see a future where European governments and companies will host their own cloud services on a combination of their own hardware and a distributed platform.

In the Netherlands someone made a nice (or maybe I should say: depressing) dashboard (still beta) for the US dependency of government agencies, schools, healthcare and companies: zijnwealautonoom.nl (‘are we autonomous yet’). Red button highlights the enormous extent to which most Dutch organisations behave like a digital colony of the US, for example screenshot shows education.

Does that mean that decoupling is finally in sight? How long before the legislation is adopted?

Good to see. Europe can reduce its reliance on Windows and start using European software like SUSE Linux, KDE, and Ubuntu. Also the article mentions AI: Europe has its own AI expertise, like Mistral AI, the French company.

I'm literally working on a project integrating a major European bank into a major US cloud (not my fault).

Maybe we build a new Twitter or Facebook, but we are still heavily using US cloud