This time, it’s the French
This post is about a recurrent pattern, which every single organization experiences.
But before we get to it, let’s talk crazy!
In the anticipated Anthropic IPO, another information tidbit was ‘leaked’. The headline from The Wall Street Journal says it all — Anthropic Expected to Tell Investors It Sees Over $30 Trillion in Potential Revenue. Sees?? In which crystal ball are you looking at? Whatever the guy is selling to people at Anthropic must be really strong.
Anyway, back to our scheduled programming.
One story didn’t make much headline outside of nerds’ publications:
France is ditching Windows for digital sovereignty — and its new Linux stack is taking shape — ZDNET
France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech — TechCrunch
France orders all government ministries to ditch Windows for Linux in digital sovereignty push — The Next Web (TNW)
The plan is to remove dependency on non-European big tech providers. Microsoft is one of them. The government identified several categories — operating systems, collaboration tools, security, AI, databases, cloud and network equipment.
Why would the French do this? The reasons are political, economical and emotional. This is a standard mix in projects like this. You pick one reason which you think is the most important and you support your arguments using the remaining two.
How do I know?
I was once part of a meeting as the technology subject matter expert. The organization decided to switch from one messaging system to another. I was there just to nod. The outcome was foregone, the meeting was theater. After the vote in favour of the migration, one of the members of the board came to me and said: ‘I heard that the new system is good. Is it true?’ It is hard to keep an optimistic view of the future of humanity.
I have many examples from my years of doing ‘computers’.
But here is one, which very closely parallels the French initiative.
Let me take you back to Munich, Germany in the year 2003.
The headline from EUobserver is Linux conquers Microsoft in Munich. The city officials decided that public money should go to public projects and Microsoft doesn’t fit the bill.
In 2008, continuing with this project, the city published the Declaration of Independence: The LiMux Project in Munich. The objective? To become independent from software suppliers.
Interesting tidbits from the document:
Start date: 2001
End date: 2012
Budget: 12.8 million Euro
Objectives: Strategic independence from software suppliers
Have you noticed that adding the word ‘strategic’ makes any statement more important?
However, the critical part of the document was this — “Proprietary software will be used where a migrations is either impossible or not cost-effective. This particularly concerns specialised administrative software packages. Munich uses 300 such programs.” and “known interoperability problems between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office”.
Flash forward to 2017, new council, new reality. That was the headline — ‘Munich council: To hell with Linux, we’re going full Windows in 2020'
Reasons? As stated above — political, economical and emotional:
“in the past 15 years, much of our efforts were put into becoming independent from Microsoft,” including spending “a lot of money looking for workarounds” but “those efforts eventually failed.”
The Social Democrats and Conservatives have a majority in the council, and the outcome is expected to be the same as in committee.
Welcome to 2020. New council, new vote, new headline — ‘Linux not Windows: Why Munich is shifting back from Microsoft to open source — again’
I am sure it was all strategic.
What started the whole project? Microsoft announced that it will stop supporting Windows NT 4.0. which nicely illustrates the tension between vendors and their customers. The vendor has the urge to innovate so it can keep selling more and forcing customers to upgrade. Customers want stability so they can focus not on technology but business. Eventually each customer needs innovation but demand is uneven. The city moves at a different speed than a startup does.
Now we are in 2026 and France decided to do something similar.
One of the recurrent patterns — and there are many of them — is that both projects started with the operating system. I would suggest that’s the last thing you want to change. As the good people in Munich discovered, much bigger problems were application and data. This is where the real cost is.
A small example — Microsoft Office. It is trivial to install the alternatives, but then you are faced with millions of files which are — guaranteed — incompatible. Not much, just a little bit, but enough to make the transition an economic disaster. I remember many years ago, a colleague from the industry was working at the time for Microsoft covering the government sector. His job was not to sell more, his job was making sure that each document was based on a template, each spreadsheet had a button which would initiate a simple workflow.
On the surface it sounds so unimportant. Until you realize that when migrating from Windows to Linux, from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice you are tasked with migration of these small things. If converting 1 document to the new format takes 1 minute, just to touch all the documents will take you years. And that’s just one of thousands of things you have to do.
I am not passing judgement if this is a good idea or not. It is a political, economical and emotional decision. I just know that this is a lengthy, expensive proposition.
The recurrent pattern? Every organization will go through exercises like this. That is guaranteed. To improve the odds of this exercise being successful, you have to do one thing: be explicit about the reasons why you are doing it. You’ll vastly improve the odds of achieving the goal. No matter what, it will always be more expensive and it will take much longer than you ever imagined. Been there, done that.