"Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft". Same for Oracle and AWS, until a year ago. Before the current insanity, Europe whould become independent like never. Now, it will take about a decade, IF the insanity continues in the next presidential terms.

Non-french might not realize that we have a huge free software community of france, made up in large part of communist state-funded scientists / researchers. They do a lot of cool stuff, you can see a few projects for example on Framasoft who has the explicit goal of un-Googling yourself : https://framasoft.org/en/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/

That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation

This is great and definitely doable. It's the initial bit that's hard, people hate switching but then when they get used to it, they won't switch back.

What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.

Isn't that what "LaSuite" is? I know this particular instance is for the French government; but isn't it open source?

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr

The actual website listing all the tools of this office suite (in French)

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products

The software part of this would be easy. People will literally write it for free, out of the sheer joy of building Free & open source software. The part the state needs to do is bootstrap a network effect that leads to people actually using it.

I guess they’ll need to employ a few engineers to add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness.

De Gaulle strikes back)

I like CryptPad.fr. End-to-end encrypted google docs.

I work at a French research institute and our Zoom contract ends soon so we get to switch to Visio. It's not too bad but quite tier below Zoom. Noise cancellation is not great, being browser based also comes with limitations, in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam ...