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Editor's take: Switzerland is joining a growing list of European countries that no longer want to do business with Microsoft and other US IT giants. The federal government has already begun ditching Microsoft's productivity tools in favor of open-source alternatives, and the country's military authorities are moving even faster with the transition.
Federal authorities of the Swiss Confederation recently launched a pilot program to replace Microsoft 365 tools with open-source alternatives. The Federal Chancellery's plan calls for investing 9 million Swiss francs (more than $11 million) to replace Redmond's productivity software with the openDesk suite on 3,000 machines, but it could eventually expand to a significantly larger number of workstations used by federal employees.
The pilot launched earlier this month, when authorities in Bern shared the results of a proof-of-concept program called "PoC BOSS." The program was designed to test the switch from Microsoft software with 172 federal employees, who used openDesk in place of Outlook, Teams, and other tools included in the Microsoft 365 offering.
