I noticed a similar thing as an European with COVID. Noise from a new disease came from China, so everybody is a bit scared and does nothing. Then Italy got the full blast of it, overloaded hospitals and all. This somehow made it real. People in our ingroup were suffering. At that point, governements got actively involved.

The Microsoft vs ICC situation seems similar. IT independence is now taken serious at governemental organisations. Our ingroup got a problem.

I wonder if it's because of the ICC, or in general because suddenly US cloud providers ended up in the same category of Chinese cloud providers: under the regime of a ruler and subservient "parliament" who can make a new rule as they wish...

It's *almost* like those research grants and talking laid some groundwork ;)

sure, but international politics was probably a little more than the straw that broke the camel's back.

Munich switched to Linux in 2012. But they switched back to Microsoft in 2020 because they never could get it to work completely. At least not to the level of comfort in the old system. Open source has its advantages, but MS dominates the business world because of its tech support that is truly second to none on that scale. If Europe wants independence, they need to support local businesses and not just technology.

Well, Minich's return to MS tech oddly coincides with MS Germany moving their HQ there (and the ruling party change in the city); it's of course hard to explicitly call backroom deals on this (even though ex-mayor seems to be doing exactly that: https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/), but it might be that the decision wasn't fully technical.

I’m not sure “they could never get [Linux] to work completely” is a fair summary of what happened.

There’s a Hacker News thread here that goes into more detail:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21497372

Tech support is clearly very important but I have a hard time believing there wasn't a great amount of lobbying involved as well.

According to the former major, bill gates went all the way there and asked for a private meeting. Although at the time he was officially no longer actively involved with microsoft.

There was, but not from Microsoft. It was the employees who were not happy with the new systems.

Employees do not participate in the procurement process. It boils down to the requirements and how does it affect possible bidders. Most of the requirements can be easily met with OSS, there were prob others plus the drop of the price from MS

This shows total disregard for the reality of the workplace. You can't shove 30,000 linux PCs onto boomer government workers and expect things to work like magic. It was a catastrophe. Especially since they no longer had the same level of tech support. The majority of them weren't even fully onboarded by the time they switched back to Windows.

The reason is bribery.