Microsoft Is DESTROYING ITSELF As Europe's FREE Office App STEALS Millions Overnight!

[00:00:00]Anna CEO Akim Vice said with the geopolitical developments we have seen in the last year there is a clear need for a reliable fully Microsoft compatible and easy to use sovereign office solution in Europe. The suite is designed specifically for public authorities, education systems and enterprises that need to move away from Microsoft 365 without losing functionality or forcing staff to learn an entirely new interface. Today, June 9th, 2026, a free office suite just went live on GitHub. Built entirely by European companies. Zero licensing fees, zero American servers, zero US law touching a single bite of your data.

[00:00:40][music] It opens Word files, it opens Excel files, it opens PowerPoint files, and it does all of that without sending anything to Microsoft.

[00:00:48]>> Your Office is not actually a brand new codebase built from scratch. It's a fork of a very popular existing open-source suite. And that fork has triggered a massive legal battle behind the scenes.

[00:00:59]>> The name is Euro Office and Microsoft has been watching it come for months. To understand why this matters, you need to go back to May 22nd, 2026. That is the day the Netherlands discovered what trusting American software actually costs.

[00:01:15]>> I think Euro office will likely achieve adoption across at least three EU member state government systems within 18 months of his June 9th launch. Quan's installation as the parliament's default search engine will probably become the template for other EU institutions.

[00:01:30]>> Microsoft handed the US House of Representatives the names, emails, meeting minutes, and calendar invitations of Dutch civil servants. Not encrypted, not redacted. Full names, full details, handed over.

[00:01:43]>> My book, Awake, the practice of critical thinking in an age of selfies, is available as an ebook and audiobook.

[00:01:48]Subscribers get 10% off and you can grab the first chapter free in the description links below. The timing of all of this, however, is inseparable from what happened two weeks ago in the Netherlands. Microsoft was caught sharing the names, email addresses, and meeting minutes of Dutch civil servants with the United States House of Representatives unredacted with full identifying information.

[00:02:10]>> These were not random employees. They worked at the Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets and the Dutch Data Protection Authority. Their job was enforcing the EU's Digital Services Act, the European law that governs [music] how tech companies operate on the continent. The US government considers that law an attack on American business.

[00:02:30]So, they wanted to know who was enforcing it. Microsoft gave them exactly [music] that.

[00:02:36]>> Microsoft had no legal ability to refuse the request under American law. [music] The Cloud Act compelled compliance. The civil servants whose identities were handed over could now face travel bans or personal sanctions from Washington for just doing their jobs enforcing European law.

[00:02:52]>> Dutch state secretary Villimine Erits went directly to the US ambassador and said if you have a problem you fight it out with us or if necessary in Europe but not against the backs of civil servants. The Dutch cabinet called it extremely worrying. Officials whose names were handed over now potentially face travel bans or personal sanctions simply for doing their jobs.

[00:03:14]Geopolitical tensions, new tariffs, and concerns over data privacy under the US Cloud Act have pushed European organizations to a breaking point. In the end, what they truly want is digital sovereignty. They want to know that their documents, their spreadsheets, and their emails aren't sitting on servers controlled by foreign companies that could change their terms or access their data at any moment. Microsoft was not reckless. Microsoft was not careless.

[00:03:40]Microsoft was legally obligated. The US Cloud [music] Act compels every American company to hand over data to the US government on request, regardless of where that data is physically stored. It does not matter if the servers are in Germany. It does not matter if the contract says European data stays in Europe. The moment data touches an American company's infrastructure, American law applies. That is not a bug.

[00:04:04]that is the system working exactly as designed, >> stating that no official agreement had been reached and that compliance with their terms is not optional. It's a classic open- source standoff, but practically speaking, NextCloud has adopted only offic's recent license cleanups. And the June 9th launch is proceeding full steam ahead. This raises an obvious question. Two weeks after that story broke, the European Parliament switched its default search engine from Google to Quant, a French privacy focused alternative that does not track users or collect personal data. The change applied to every computer in the building. 7020 lawmakers, thousands of staff, all of them woke up that morning and Google was gone.

[00:04:43]>> Your office with a single click shortly after launch. I NOS plans to roll it into their broader NextCloud workspace offering later this summer. XWiki, the French enterprise wiki vendor, is integrating it in the fourth quarter, and Dutch-based Office.Eeu has committed to a full rollout by the end of the year. This >> the parliament spokesperson described it as part of a larger framework of actions aimed at reducing EP reliance on non-EU digital tools. On that exact same day, the European Commission published its tech sovereignty package, a binding legislative framework that restricts American cloud providers from handling sensitive European government data and requires European preference and procurement for digital services. Two announcements, one morning, not a coincidence. And then 5 days later, Euro office went live. designed to curb big tax access to strategic government tenders. The upcoming tax sovereignty package scheduled to be presented on May 27th includes the Cloud and AI development act which aims to force EU member governments to use homegrown European cloud capacity for hosting sensitive public sector data. This isn't just about cloud hosting. It's about the >> the project is backed by Ionus, Nextcloud, XWiki, Open Project, Open Exchange, TUDA, and several other European firms. It is fully open source, published on GitHub, free for any government, school or company to download and deploy on their own infrastructure. It is backed by a who is who of European cloud hosting and collaboration vendors. The coalition includes Germany's NOS and NexCloud along with Euroack, XWiki, Open Project, Sovereign, Ailion, Btactic, Open Exchange, and Office.eu. These companies are not just putting their names on the press release. They are actively investing millions of euros. Ayon CEO Akim Vice said there is [music] a clear need for a reliable fully Microsoft compatible and easytouse sovereign office solution in Europe. [music] That last part matters. Microsoft compatible.

[00:06:43]Not a replacement that forces your IT department to retrain thousands [music] of people. Not a system where files open wrong or formatting breaks. Compatible.

[00:06:52]Open a [music] Word document, edit it, save it. The file stays a Word document.

[00:06:58]So, what actually is your office? On paper, it's a web-based open-source productivity suite that includes four core applications. A document editor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation tool, and a built-in PDF editor. If you've used Microsoft Word, what Euro Office actually includes at launch is a document editor, a spreadsheet editor, and a presentation editor with real-time collaboration built in from day one.

[00:07:25]Multiple people can work on the same file simultaneously, [music] which is the feature that made Google Docs and Microsoft 365 non-negotiable for most teams. Euro Office [music] has it and it runs entirely on European infrastructure under European law. The suite reads and writes Microsoft's own file formats, including DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX, which means organizations adopting it can do so without retraining staff or losing the ability to exchange documents with partners still using Microsoft products.

[00:07:54]The hosting options matter here. [music] Organizations can choose a fully managed deployment through Ionos hosted in German data centers. They can run a hybrid model or [music] they can self-host the entire stack using Docker containers on their own hardware. In the self-hosted scenario, no third party touches the data at all. Not Ionos, not anyone. The US Cloud Act cannot reach data that never enters an American company's hands. XWiki, the French enterprise wiki vendor, is integrating it in the fourth quarter, and Dutchbased Office.eu has committed to a full rollout by the end of the year. This means your office will instantly be in front of millions of enterprise and public sector users without them having to change a single workflow. Here is what Euro Office is not. [music] It is not a desktop application yet. At launch, it is web only, which means no offline editing and no integration with local file systems. Desktop and mobile apps are confirmed as coming, [music] but the release date is somewhere in summer 2026 with no specific day attached. For users who work entirely in the browser, that limitation means nothing. For users who open files on airplanes or in locations without reliable internet, it is a real gap. The launch also arrived with legal drama attached. Euro office is a fork of only office, an existing open-source document editor. When NextCloud and Ionos announced the project in March, Only Office accused them of violating licensing terms, suspended an 8-year partnership with Nextcloud, and alleged staff poaching. The dispute became its own news cycle. Forester analyst Daario Misto said publicly that the controversy creates uncertainty for enterprise buyers evaluating the platform. to complete the migration and invest further in open source development.

[00:09:42]Separately, Switzerland's data protection authorities have declared international cloud services unsuitable for handling personal data, adding another regulatory signal to the broader European shift. The economics of these migrations are straightforward at the institutional level. Open source software carries no per seat licensing fees. European public bodies migrating to Euro Office or similar platforms.

[00:10:01]>> By May, the dispute was reportedly resolved. Only office asked for attribution. An agreement [music] was reached. The two projects now maintain separate code bases going forward. A major switching cost. Consortium governance means the cost of maintaining and improving the software is shared collectively across governments and organizations rather than funded individually. But the effects stretch well beyond the institutions making the initial switch. When a government ministry migrates to open source office software, its suppliers, contractors, and partner organizations face practical pressure to support the same document formats. The reason any of this is building [music] momentum goes beyond the Dutch data leak. It goes beyond one product launch. There is a pattern running underneath all of it and France is where it is most visible.

[00:10:44]>> France has incorporated Linux desktops into its national digital sovereignty strategy. Dynam [music] France's interministerial digital directorate announced a transition from Windows to Linux workstations.

[00:10:57]>> In January 2026, France issued a binding mandate. Microsoft Teams, Zoom, WebEx, and Goto Meeting were banned across all government institutions, replaced by Vizio, a French-built video conferencing platform for all 2.5 million civil servants. Deadline 2027. Then in April 2026, France's interministerial digital directorate went further. Every single government ministry was ordered to submit a formal migration plan from Windows to Linux by autumn 2026. Not a pilot, not a recommendation. A mandatory plan for 2.5 million government desktops. Analysts estimate the full migration will cost between 1.5 billion and€3 billion over 5 to 7 years. France is paying that price deliberately. The savings on licensing fees alone are projected at roughly €1 million per year for every 100,000 users who switch. The Linux distribution France is most likely to use is Genbuntu, a version of Ubuntu that the French National Police Force has been running since 2008. It already runs on over a 100,000 police computers.

[00:12:03]The technical foundation is not theoretical. It has been tested for nearly two decades inside a government institution. France already moved 80,000 National Health Insurance Fund employees to open- source alternatives before this announcement. The encrypted messaging platform chap and file transfer service France transferred are already used by up to 600,000 civil servants. The country is not starting from zero. It is scaling what already works.

[00:12:28]>> European soil financed by European banks ASML funding it. The EU building five AI gigafactories. Then for satellites we have Iris Squared replacing Starling dependency.

[00:12:40]>> France is not alone. The Netherlands signed contracts with Stackett, a European cloud platform owned by Germany's Schwarz Group, letting ministries move workloads to European infrastructure immediately. The Netherlands also contracted KPN and Thales to build a sovereign military cloud hosted in defense operated data centers. Both contracts were signed before the Microsoft leak even became public. The shift was already in motion.

[00:13:04]The leak just accelerated it. Eosia, the German search engine with over 25 million monthly users, switched its AI system to a European model provider just last month. And Switzerland has already begun migrating government infrastructure away from Microsoft to domestic alternatives.

[00:13:22]>> Switzerland has begun migrating government infrastructure away from Microsoft. Germany's Schleswig Holstein state has had 30,000 workers on Liber Office and Linux since a process that started years ago. The International Criminal Court moved from Microsoft to a European alternative after Microsoft allegedly blocked the chief prosecutor's email following US sanctions in 2025.

[00:13:45]Eight European technology companies launched a joint open-source office suite in Berlin on March 27th, 2026, directly challenging Microsoft's grip on productivity software used by governments and public institutions across the continent. The European Commission's position is that the continent currently relies on non-EU countries for over 80% of its essential digital products, services, and infrastructure. That number is the entire argument for digital sovereignty wrapped in one statistic. Four out of every five digital tools European governments use every day are controlled by companies that operate under foreign law. The Cloud Act is what makes that dependency dangerous. It is a 2018 US law. It does not care where data is stored. It does not care what a contract says. If you use Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, [music] your data is reachable by the US government. Period. European governments discovered this was not theoretical when Dutch civil servants found their names in a US [music] congressional document. What Euro office represents is the moment the alternative became real. Not someday, not in a few years. Today, [music] a working product, free, open- source, compatible with Microsoft file formats. backed by major European companies, hosted on European infrastructure, available to any institution that wants it right now. The limitations are real web only at launch.

[00:15:04]Legal drama with the codebase, no confirmed date for desktop apps. These are genuine problems for organizations evaluating whether to migrate. But the institutions currently moving away from Microsoft are not doing it because the alternative is perfect. They are doing it because the alternative now exists and because the cost of staying has become visible in a way it never was before.

[00:15:26]>> But because every institution on the continent looked at its screen on the same morning and basically concluded this has to change and then just changed it. But the software is only sovereign if the data underneath it stays in Europe.

[00:15:39]>> When Microsoft handed Dutch civil servants names to a foreign government, it was not a scandal Microsoft created.

[00:15:45]It was a scandal the Cloud Act created.

[00:15:47]Microsoft [music] had no choice. That is what makes the problem impossible to fix with a press release or a policy update.

[00:15:53]As long as data lives on American infrastructure, American law governs it.

[00:15:57]The only way out of that is European infrastructure. Euro office is the first tool in that shift that any person or any organization can download and use today. Not a government contract, not a procurement process. GitHub free now.

[00:16:12]The European Parliament already replaced Google. France already banned Microsoft Teams. [music] The Netherlands already signed contracts with European cloud providers. The EU Commission published the legal framework to make all of this mandatory.

[00:16:25]>> Officials told lawmakers in an email that the switch is being made in line with the parliament's commitment to digital sovereignty and the protection of users personal data.

[00:16:35]>> Euro office is not the end of Microsoft in Europe. Microsoft's enterprise contracts run deep. Corporate infrastructure does not move overnight.

[00:16:44]The company is not in crisis. But the direction has changed. The institutions that used to say there was no European alternative can no longer say that. The civil servants whose names ended up in a US congressional document made that argument impossible to ignore. And the companies that built Euro office made the alternative impossible to dismiss.

[00:17:04]Today is the day the switch became available. How many will actually flip it is the question the next 12 months will