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Bern steps away from Microsoft

Bern steps away from Microsoft

What the Swiss Federal Chancellery actually decided

On 3 September 2026 Bern closed the trial it calls PoC BOSS: one hundred and seventy-two Federal Chancellery staff spent months working on openDesk instead of Microsoft 365. The verdict came back encouraging enough to trigger the next phase. By the end of 2027 roughly three thousand federal workstations will move to the open source platform, with a budget of nine million Swiss francs allocated by the Chancellery itself.

The proportions are worth keeping in view, because the international press ran the story with a certain amount of enthusiasm. Swiss federal administration runs about fifty-four thousand machines, all of them on Redmond software: three thousand desks amount to a little over seven per cent of the estate. Nobody has switched Outlook off across the Confederation. A second route has opened, which is a different operation and, in some respects, a more interesting one.

The technical debrief deserves an honest reading too. Document handling and email held up without drama, while large-scale video conferencing showed clear limits. That happens to be precisely where open suites struggle most, and admitting it in a public report counts for more than any triumphant press release.

What openDesk is and who builds it

openDesk was not born in Switzerland. It is a product of ZenDiS, the Centre for Digital Sovereignty founded in 2022 by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, and it assembles components already proven across the European ecosystem: Open-Xchange for mail, calendar and contacts, Nextcloud for file storage, Collabora Online for collaborative writing, Element on the Matrix standard for messaging, XWiki for the knowledge base, OpenProject for project management, Nubus by Univention for identity and access, Nordeck for video meetings.

The supplier list says a good deal about the industrial model being attempted here: nine companies, nearly all German, living on support contracts rather than per-seat licences. The code sits on openCode and anyone can inspect it, fork it, host it wherever they prefer. Bern is not buying a product, it is joining somebody else’s project and becoming a co-user of it.

The Cloud Act, rising costs and a contract that tripled

Three reasons have been stated publicly, and separating them helps, because they carry different weight.

The first concerns foreign access to government data: the US Cloud Act lets American authorities demand information held by US companies even when the servers sit elsewhere. Matthias Stürmer, professor at the Bern University of Applied Sciences and a recurring voice in the Swiss debate, puts it plainly: that statute effectively allows the American government to reach the Confederation’s emails and documents.

The second is the operational fragility of depending on a single supplier for an entire state’s digital desk.

The third is the most concrete and possibly the most decisive. Again according to Stürmer, in 2009 the Confederation signed a contract with Microsoft worth forty-two million francs; today the same budget line exceeds one hundred and forty million. A multiplier of that size, with no bargaining leverage on the customer’s side, turns a technology question into a public finance question. The July 2026 price rises did not help: Microsoft 365 E3 went from thirty-six to thirty-nine dollars per user per month, Office 365 E3 climbed thirteen per cent, Business Basic almost seventeen.

The legislative backdrop explains the timing. The EMBAG law, in force since 2024, obliges federal bodies to publish software developed on behalf of the state as open source, and in December 2025 the Federal Council placed technological autonomy among its policy priorities. The Chancellery pilot puts an existing direction into practice.

The army is moving faster than the civil service

The least reported detail is a military one. Switzerland’s Cyber Command announced in July 2026 that it would leave Microsoft Office completely by October of the same year, migrating to openDesk, proceeding on its own and on a far tighter schedule than the civilian side.

When a country’s information security specialists are the first to shut the door, the signal shifts from ideological to a matter of risk assessment. It will be worth watching how much of that experience transfers to ordinary administration, which has less trained users and less compressible processes.

The precedents that have worked

Schleswig-Holstein remains the sturdiest case study in Europe. The German state moved close to eighty per cent of its thirty thousand workstations onto LibreOffice by December 2025, with a declared saving of over fifteen million euros a year in licence fees and a one-off investment of nine million earmarked for 2026 to finish the job. Digitalisation minister Dirk Schrödter keeps making a point worth borrowing: the operation justifies itself on economic grounds alone, with no need to lean on an identity argument.

Denmark moved its own Ministry of Digitalisation to LibreOffice in 2025, stating technological independence as the goal openly. Lyon, France’s third city, decided in June of that year to replace Windows and Office with Linux and OnlyOffice. The sites differ in scale, yet the bearing is the same.

The precedent that ended badly

Then there is Munich, and anyone writing about this subject has a duty to cite it. The LiMux project put the city administration on Linux from 2004 onwards, only to be dismantled in 2017 with a return to Windows that the press of the day priced at around fifty million euros. Accounts diverge on the causes: limping interoperability and insufficient preparation on one side, a change of political majority and the relocation of Microsoft’s German headquarters into the city on the other.

That episode teaches two things. The first is that the real cost of a migration sits with people rather than software. The second is that a venture of this kind survives only if it withstands at least one change of government, which has far more to do with politics than with computing.

What Microsoft actually stands to lose

On immediate revenue, very little. Three thousand Swiss desks and thirty thousand German ones make no dent in a balance sheet that lives on cloud and artificial intelligence. The exposure is of another kind and works over long horizons.

A contractual precedent is forming across Europe: first the existence of a ready alternative, then proof that the switch is technically sustainable, finally the chance for any public body to sit down at the negotiating table holding a card. For a supplier whose position rests on the absence of viable exits, the loss concerns pricing power rather than licences sold.

The company has answered with its European Digital Commitments: European data centre capacity growing by forty per cent, two hundred facilities by 2027, a presence in sixteen countries, an EU Data Boundary to keep European customer data inside the Union, and a pledge to take its own government to court in order to defend continental operations. Frank Karlitschek, founder of Nextcloud, considers those guarantees inadequate: with updates and source code under somebody else’s control, he argues, the problem stays open even when the servers stand in Frankfurt.

A contested episode from 2025 hangs over all this, when reports circulated about the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court having his mailbox blocked. Microsoft denied suspending any services to the Court and in February 2026 asked the UK Parliament to correct the record. However the events unfolded, the doubt was enough: since then every European public sector IT lead knows how to phrase the right question, and the right question is how long it would take to get back up and running if access disappeared.

And Italy?

Here comes the part that interests me, and that leaves me faintly irritated. I live in Milan, a couple of hours from the border: the Switzerland I picture is the one that decides slowly and then executes, not the one issuing statements. Yet on public digital infrastructure it has a site up and running, while over here we are still stuck at the preamble.

The Italian picture is documented: strategies drafted, rules in place, no national replacement plan comparable in breadth or continuity to those of France, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. On this front Italy comes out as the most wait-and-see country in the Union, and not for lack of technical skill, which exists inside public administrations and shows.

I have written something similar about other Swiss choices before, and the shape of the argument does not change: whoever waits is not avoiding the decision, they are still taking it, handing it over to whoever renews the contract. Absent a credible alternative, automatic renewal becomes industrial policy. I keep hoping somebody around Rome will at least open a folder with the word pilot on the cover. For now, though, nothing shows up.

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Chiara Bonifazi