The Danish Minister of Digitization, Caroline Stage, wants to completely phase out Microsoft’s services from her department.
The Minister plans to remove Microsoft’s operating system, Windows, from half of the employees’ computers this Summer and replace it with Linux. Microsoft’s productivity suite, Office 365, will be swapped for open-source software called Libre Office.
If everything goes as expected, all employees will work in a “Microsoft-free” environment by autumn.
“If phasing out proves to be too complicated, we can revert back to Microsoft in an instant,” Minister Stage says in an interview with Danish news outlet Politiken.
The move is part of Stage’s strategy to become less dependent on American tech services. According to the Minister, “digital sovereignty” is a top priority for the Danish government, municipalities, and regions.
In recent months, the search for alternatives to tech services from the United States has accelerated.
This all began in November 2024, when Donald Trump was re-elected as the 47th President of the United States, and tech executives like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Tim Cook rallied behind him. Since then, the consensus in Europe seems to be that American tech companies are getting too big and powerful, and that we’re becoming too dependent on big tech.
This became clear when Karim Khan, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), recently lost access to his email account, and his bank accounts had been frozen.
This happened shortly after the ICC issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for allegedly committing war crimes against the people of Gaza by restricting humanitarian aid and intentionally targeting civilians in Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
In hindsight, Microsoft didn’t annul its services to Khan. Instead, the ICC’s Chief Prosecutor decided to move to Proton Mail after the Trump administration announced sanctions against Khan and the ICC.
This case does show that there are significant risks in using and depending on online services from the US and non-EU countries.
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