> Luckily most European politicians are corrupt and can easily be bought to prevent them from ditching Azure and Windows.

They're not corrupt (in a lot of cases), mostly just ignorant. Like, they don't understand the tech, and microsoft is safe, they're already using it so handing over large swathes of their infra to them seems reasonable.

MS have wonderful sales people, and this is why they do well with governments and large enterprises.

There's also a co-ordination problem, in that all of your counterparties (like your citizens, for instance) are familiar with MS and therefore it costs a bunch locally to move, for little short-term reward.

This is actually a place where (good) regulation could derisk a lot of these changes, but you'd need a committed group of politicians who can convince the civil servants to keep at it. It'll happen, but slowly and in starts over the next 5-15 years.

Where does corruption start and lobbying begin? American cloud providers are hosting more than $340 billion worth of European workloads on their infrastructure, including email, videoconferencing, office documents and storage.

If they transfer this to sovereign providers it would cost Big Tech serious money. So they're quietly lobbying to slow down the speed at which European nations are moving away from them.

I literally had a person from IT tell me “Firefox is open source so it’s not secure, that’s why we have to use Edge” the other day. They are beyond hopeless.