First order of business should be to detach the governments from Microsoft. Probably the hardest part of this whole tangle is that the governing bodies are so bound to MS that any move can hit back twice as hard. It's easier to legislate the consumer side, since it's not directly affecting the efficiency and budgets of the organizations making the legislation.

Thankfully, it seems that a movement from inside governments is really starting, with more and more project funding demanding e.g. avoiding vendor lock-in. This helped push one of my projects from MSSQL to Postgres. One step at a time...

Are there any specific Microsoft products you would prioritize?

I'd envision building a plug-in replacement to facilitate switching.

That's a tricky one. From my bubble, the first thing I would to is to stop digging the hole any deeper - stopping any ongoing Azure (and other US cloud migrations), not buying into new products such as MS Fabric etc.

But what really would rock the boat would be a MS 365 competitor, since that's currently suffocating everything, because everything is included: email, files, office suite, chat... None of these have to be the Same Product (and I'd prefer specialization), but the integration between different apps should be painless. So, protocols.

If nation states could onshore that package, it would even out the playing field for the other, more optional applications

I think what makes Microsoft so hard to challenge is not one product but the fact they have a tightly integrated ecosystem. Everything is coupled with the Active Directory, Azure and Office365. By themselves these components aren't irreplaceable but no company has ever been able to offer as wide a range of products.

Two different questions.

From a public interest point of view I would say AWS, GCP and Azure

From the likelihood of a business being successful probably less well entrenched services, and ones politicians understand - so probably things directly used by consumers and very visible. Probably SaaS of some kind.

Also, its not just the EU (which is what the article is about). Non EU European countries, and the rest of the world too also have a problem with this dependence. I think the best approach would be broad collaborations on development, with deployment at a national level so every country could have sovereign data centres.

My hope was that this would allow us to move away from SaaS, get a fast native software ecosystem where you store the data on your own machines.

Going back to the old ways, where software was shrink wrapped, fast and local. So if that's where we end up I think we failed to make use of the potential in this forced decoupling event.

> My hope was that this would allow us to move away from SaaS, get a fast native software ecosystem where you store the data on your own machines.

I would prefer that, but the GP was asking what a startup should try to do, and I think trying to get people to go back to using their own machines would be an additional barrier.

I do wonder if building software that runs on your own machine would be a market advantage in the EU.

One could market strongly with the data privacy / sovereignty angle that resonates a lot more in Europe than the US.

Maybe with tech people, but non-tech management and consumers do not care in my experience.

I think its partly a cultural change with regard to privacy and partly learned helplessness.

This could be the ultimate push to open source, pushed by most if not all non-US governments globally.

As for services/products - cloud and MS. From MS - Active directory, Exchange, Outlook, Word, Excel and probably Powerpoint in no particular order. The key is not to have something basic cca working, we have those for decades and they are pretty fringe. Walking the last mile, the hardest part of smoothing integration, ironing UI, responsiveness. This would be a massive task, but worth it.

You have this, you don't need to look back at questionable US products anymore, at least not until they ship as bunch of code that you build and review locally. Goodbye NSA, back to cutting fiber optic cables on the bottom of the sea.

The integration might be the best real reason, but IMO the real reason is branding and good marketing.

A lot of FOSS and other non-US software has at least as good UI and often better responsiveness.

However for many people particular apps they need are Windows only. Lots of industry vertical stuff.

With regard to marketing and branding, a lot of people use AWS because of the brand. Its not a particularly good provider of VPSs but I have lost count of how many people use AWS as a VPS provider (not using other services) and even worse most of them buy and instance plus storage rather than saving money by using Lightsail. I have had people argue that potential acquirers might be put off by using smaller providers.

Enforce separation of layers through interoperability. Each layer of the tech stack should be easy for someone to swap out (or even choose at first use). The mainboard, the processor, the RAM, the disk, the firmware, the bootloader, the OS, the apps, the each layer of the network services etc.