If you're a small business and your files are in Microsoft formats and none of the conversion utilities are very good you're in trouble. If you're a government with hundreds of IT staff, you can improve the conversion utilities. You can make "runs on Linux" a requirement for software you buy and be large enough that vendors will port their software to Linux in order to get your business.
That is why Microsoft is so afraid of governments doing this. Because once the conversion utility is improved, it's improved for everyone. Once the vendor takes the time to do a Linux port, it exists for everyone. Which makes it cheaper for other entities to switch to Linux, which causes even more progress in reducing the friction to switching for everyone else.
That's not even mentioning things like the extreme reliance on Microsoft AD.
Step two, you change out the underlying OS and people barely notice because all the applications are the same.
I don't think it's a good idea anyway to switch every client over, but it would be nice if governments would consider Linux for servers more. The default assumption of new machine = new windows licence is very wasteful.