Europe’s search for alternatives to Microsoft infrastructure and software is gaining speed, but catching the US giant is not an easy task for the European bloc and may take decades.
A bigger win could come sooner, keeping software spending, sensitive data, and skilled workers inside Europe while giving local providers room to grow.
According to Euractiv, Europe’s problem is all about scale, with reports highlighting that Nextcloud has been growing revenue by 50% to 80% a year, while Microsoft grew revenue by 15% last year and reached nearly $290 billion (€250 billion).
Mistral is targeting $1.16 billion (€1 billion) in revenue this year, while Germany’s federal administration spent roughly half that amount on Microsoft licenses alone. Seeking alternatives to Microsoft has yet to fill a huge gap, but every public contract moved to a European provider to secure more money, technical knowledge, and data under EU control.
Europe’s Software Gap Is Also a Money Gap
The strongest case for alternatives to Microsoft may not be that they can replace Microsoft across Europe tomorrow. It is that they can give European companies enough demand to grow, hire, and improve products that governments currently buy mostly from US technology groups.
Nextcloud is already building Microsoft 365 alternatives with other European companies, including Proton and Open-Xchange.
Euractiv reports that the group is preparing desktop products aimed at common workplace tools such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
That effort matters because alternative software for MS Office does more than add another product to the market, delivering public administrations with means to move daily work, documents, and collaboration tools into systems developed closer to the laws and institutions that use them.
Still, Europe is far from matching Microsoft’s size.
“If we keep growing like we’re growing, we’ll need a hundred years until we’ve caught up to Microsoft,” one European technology leader told Euractiv, showing how deep the current dependency remains.
Yet size is not the only measure of progress. European alternatives to Microsoft can win smaller parts of the market first, especially in governments, universities, defence, and organizations that care about where their data is stored and who controls the software around it.
The Euro-Office project shows how that market could develop.
IONOS, Nextcloud and five other European companies are working on one integrated office environment that combines services such as cloud storage, email, document work, project management, and intranet tools. IO+ says the project is open source and is designed to reduce dependence on US providers and limit vendor lock-in.
For buyers, a Microsoft 365 alternative is more about control than convenience, as open-source systems can make it easier to change providers without losing access to the software or facing the same switching barriers that keep institutions tied to one ecosystem.
Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch has also pointed to a change in buying decisions.
“We do see some very positive signs,” said Mensch as governments and companies reconsider where they source technology, a shift that can send more revenue toward European providers.
Europe’s Stronger Advantage May Be Its Skills
Software sovereignty will also depend on infrastructure to present a Microsoft Cloud alternative to give European institutions another place to run sensitive workloads. Cloud capacity, however, only becomes strategically pivotal when Europe also has people who can build, secure, operate, and improve it.
The EU has started putting money behind that goal. The European Commission awarded a $209 million (€180 million) sovereign cloud framework in April, and it has considered moving some internal digital services to European providers including StackIT, OVHcloud, Scaleway, and S3NS.
That makes EU sovereign Cloud infrastructure part of a wider economic question. If European governments direct even part of their technology budgets toward regional providers, those companies gain revenue that can be used for hiring, product development, data centers, and research instead of sending most of that value abroad.
The same logic applies to alternatives to Microsoft in workplace software. Europe does not need to remove Microsoft from every institution to create an effect; it needs enough credible competition to weaken automatic purchasing decisions and give public buyers a real choice.
A second wave of Microsoft 365 alternatives could also create demand for European developers, cybersecurity specialists, cloud engineers, and support teams. That talent may be harder to replace than a single software product because skills can move across companies, technologies, and new industries.
This is where alternative software for MS Office connects with Europe’s wider AI ambitions. Software can be bought from abroad, but a skilled workforce creates knowledge that stays in the region and can be used to build the next generation of products.
Microsoft itself is making the skills argument.
“I see Greece as more than a market; I see it as an innovation hub,” said Southern Europe Vice President, Charles Calestroupat.
Microsoft has trained 100,000 people in Greece through its GR for GRowth initiative, while shortages remain in cloud and DevOps, cybersecurity, software engineering, and AI.
A Microsoft 365 alternative may therefore matter even when Microsoft remains the larger platform. Every successful European product gives engineers and users experience in building and running systems outside one dominant ecosystem.
The growth of European alternatives to Microsoft 365 could also keep more institutional knowledge inside Europe. Governments that understand how to deploy, maintain, and switch between local systems gain bargaining power even if they continue using Microsoft as part of their operations.
In the long run, another Microsoft 365 alternative will not decide Europe’s technology position itself. The bigger test is whether Europe can turn software demand into companies that scale, data that stays under European rules, and workers with the skills to build what comes next.
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