The Impossible Dependency

Imagine a university trying to function if Microsoft suddenly became unavailable. According to Utrecht University professors José van Dijck and Albert Meijer, the answer is bleak: “All research and education would come to an immediate standstill.” Their March 2025 open letter pointed specifically to Utrecht’s “particular dependence on Microsoft Office 365” for email, video calls, document sharing, and data storage.

This creates “vulnerabilities, especially in light of a rapidly changing geopolitical situation” they wrote, noting that “dependence on big tech is fundamentally at odds with public values such as freedom, independence, autonomy and equality.”

The dependency isn’t theoretical. Seven Dutch universities and one university college are already on Florida’s sanctions list for severing or freezing ties with Israeli institutions. With Donald Trump potentially returning to power, educational institutions could face similar “punishment” at any moment, as Wladimir Mufty, SURF’s digital sovereignty programme manager, noted with concern.

Microsoft’s Vertical and Horizontal Empire

What makes Microsoft particularly difficult to replace is the company’s dual expansion strategy. Specialists describe Microsoft as “vertically integrated” – everything from basic technology to end-user applications flows through one company. But the company has also expanded “horizontally” by acquiring content-focused platforms like LinkedIn and GitHub.

“This is a new phase, which I find worrying”, says Mufty. Microsoft’s recent partnership with Finnish publisher Sanoma, which produces Dutch educational materials through its Malmberg subsidiary, exemplifies the concern. The plan: integrate learning materials directly into Microsoft Teams with “learning accelerators” – essentially AI designed to personalize education.

“Things like this sometimes keep me awake at night”, Mufty admits.

The German Escape Hatch

The International Criminal Court’s move to OpenDesk provides a working blueprint for Microsoft independence. The German open-source alternative offers email, document editing, presentations, file sharing, and video calls while allowing anyone to inspect and improve its code.

Similarly, around 75 researchers from five Dutch universities have been testing Nextcloud since early 2025. Jacqueline Kernahan, a TU Delft PhD student involved in the pilot, notes that while there are “still a few glitches here and there”, the software could realistically compete with Microsoft. Her assessment: “The word processor is quite good.”

Interestingly, Microsoft is making the switch more attractive by “putting AI in everything”, which Kernahan finds “increasingly annoying to use.”

The Enterprise Architecture Parallel

This university dilemma mirrors a broader trend in enterprise software architecture. As a recent Medium analysis noted, companies are rediscovering the benefits of monolithic architectures after years of microservices hype.

The parallels are striking. Just as companies found microservices could become “mini headaches” with debugging that “felt like crime scene investigation” and infrastructure costs that “blew up”, universities are discovering that Microsoft’s integrated ecosystem comes with hidden costs.

When Amazon moved from microservices back to monoliths for Prime Video, they eliminated cold starts, dropped infrastructure costs, and improved performance. Universities face a similar calculus: the integration benefits of Microsoft versus the flexibility and independence of modular alternatives.

The Migration Reality Check

Despite the theoretical appeal of open-source alternatives, Mufty cautions that “not all educational institutions will be able to switch to OpenDesk or Nextcloud overnight.” The Criminal Court acted “under pressure, but if a university wanted to move away from Microsoft tomorrow, that would pose a problem.”

University of Groningen Rector Jacquelien Scherpen advocates incremental steps: “If we now choose an alternative product that functions less well, students and staff will start using free programmes, and we will be further away from our goal.”

Her solution? Run two systems in parallel – exactly what businesses do during architectural migrations. The cost: “additional expenditure on support, maintenance, and security.” Scherpen also calls for legislation to protect European alternatives from acquisition: “Suppose a university partners up with a European competitor of Microsoft, and then Microsoft buys that company, what is the university to do then?”

The Modular Alternative Ecosystem

This brings us to the core architectural choice: monolith versus modular ecosystem. Microsoft represents the ultimate enterprise monolith – vertically integrated, feature-complete, but creating profound dependency.

The modular alternative requires stitching together multiple specialized tools, each potentially serving its purpose better than Microsoft’s equivalent, but requiring integration work.

Tools like n8n demonstrate what’s possible in a modular ecosystem. The fair-code automation platform with over 1,200 pre-built integrations provides the kind of interoperability that could replace Microsoft’s automation capabilities. n8n’s execution-based pricing model – where you pay for complete workflow runs rather than per step – creates different economic incentives than Microsoft’s per-user licensing.

But this comes at a cost. As the monoliths-versus-microservices debate has shown, modular approaches introduce complexity. Each integration point becomes a potential failure point. Each tool requires specialized knowledge. While Amazon found that consolidating services into a monolith eliminated latency from “death by 1000 HTTP calls” and reduced debugging complexity, universities would be moving in the opposite direction.

Sovereignty Versus Convenience

Dutch lecturers have been sounding the alarm through organizations like DCC-PO, which recently stated that “the dominance of parties such as Google and Microsoft threatens the autonomy of Dutch researchers.” The Young Academy echoed these concerns in July, warning that outsourcing IT management means institutions are “losing technical knowledge and control.”

This creates a classic architectural trade-off: convenience versus sovereignty. Microsoft’s integrated approach reduces operational overhead while increasing dependency risk. The modular alternative requires more integration work but preserves independence.

Mufty argues that “no sector is as value-driven as education and research. This is precisely where alternatives should be able to get off the ground.” But he acknowledges the harsh reality: “When the need arises, one shouldn’t have to start from scratch. Moreover, competition ensures that the market leader cannot charge top dollar.”

The Geopolitical Shadow

The university’s Microsoft dilemma extends beyond mere software preferences into fundamental questions of institutional autonomy. With Microsoft building its own data centers and even laying internet cables on the seabed, the company controls not just applications but the infrastructure beneath them.

Dutch and European alternatives do exist. Research institute TNO is working with SURF and the Netherlands Forensic Institute on its own AI language model. SURFConext provides a secure login service. But as Mufty notes, “that’s not enough. If logging in via Microsoft doesn’t work in the future for whatever reason, we’ll have a big problem.”

This dependency extends to applications outside Microsoft’s ecosystem too – a cascading failure scenario that keeps IT leaders awake at night.

The Future Is Hybrid

The likely outcome isn’t a clean break but a hybrid approach. Just as enterprise architecture is embracing modular monoliths – single deployment artifacts with strong separation of concerns – universities will probably maintain Microsoft for some functions while adopting alternatives for others.

The Nextcloud pilot shows this already happening: researchers use Microsoft for some tasks and open alternatives for others. What’s significant isn’t the complete replacement but proving that alternatives can function at enterprise scale.

As Rector Scherpen argues, “Perhaps we need to become more protectionist, without hindering the free exchange of new insights and innovations. We must ensure that the independence we are fighting for does not slip out of our hands again.”

The Dutch university experiment represents a critical test case for any large organization considering independence from tech giants. If educational institutions with their public missions and technical expertise can’t escape vendor lock-in, what hope do other sectors have?

The answer may lie not in complete replacement but in strategic diversification – maintaining competition through viable alternatives rather than betting everything on a single ecosystem. In architecture as in geopolitics, having options matters when circumstances change unexpectedly.