A plan by the Swiss Federal Chancellery to invest roughly $11 million in moving away from Microsoft products like Outlook and Teams became a hot topic on the overseas forum Lemmy’s c/europe community. The initiative is reportedly an experimental effort covering around 3,000 employees. Commenters repeatedly cited the German city of Munich’s “LiMux” project, which pushed a Linux migration only to later reverse course, and opinions split over whether that failure stemmed from Microsoft lobbying or simple technical glitches. On the $11 million figure itself, some called it cheap for a national budget, while others questioned whether the investment would ever pay for itself.
Switzerland is paying $11 million to stop using Outlook and Teams
Wait, wasn't Munich's migration 'failure' ultimately down to Microsoft lobbying and bribery?
7Anonymous2026-09-13 23:28
Yeah, exactly. When I wrote an article for heise.de back in 2012, I interviewed Munich's CTO (his actual quotes never made it into the piece, just a summary), and he said politicians deliberately starved Linux support so Microsoft's IT support would look better by comparison. He specifically named a failed software project called WollMux, a document-formatting system, as an example.
15Anonymous2026-09-14 07:10
Oh come on, it's totally a coincidence that they dropped LiMux right after Microsoft moved its EU headquarters to Munich, and that the city now has one of the biggest IT budgets of any city (€500 million) (lol)
27Anonymous2026-09-14 10:20
I think the reason it 'failed' was that the email client they used had a bug where it couldn't handle emails with subject lines that were too long. That turned into 'See, Linux doesn't work — switch everything back to Microsoft right now.'
4Anonymous2026-09-14 01:00
$11 million is pocket change next to a national budget. Not ideal, but as an investment to end dependence on American companies, it's not bad at all.
26Anonymous2026-09-14 11:28
Also, the important thing is that the more big organizations switch to open alternatives, the more investment and development flows into them. Eventually they'll catch up in usability and features too.
5Anonymous2026-09-13 19:20
Maybe I missed it in the article, but I'd like to know how much they're currently paying for Microsoft software and licenses, and how much they're projected to pay going forward.
10Anonymous2026-09-13 21:17
Exactly. The question that always matters is how many years it takes to pay off. One year? Six months? Big numbers alone are just for shock value.
16Anonymous2026-09-13 21:37
With about 38,000 federal employees and an enterprise license running $36 per person per month, that works out to roughly $12 million a year.
8Anonymous2026-09-13 19:17
A small price to pay for salvation.
9Anonymous2026-09-13 23:26
A big number? It's $11 million. That's chump change at this scale.
11Anonymous2026-09-14 09:36
I know a few people who'd personally pay $11 million just to stop using Teams.
12Anonymous2026-09-13 19:42
The technology is already there. The hard part is training people.
20Anonymous2026-09-13 20:09
Exactly that. The technology itself is actually the easy part — getting people used to a completely different workflow is where it gets messy.
21Anonymous2026-09-13 19:23
I get what you mean. Breaking away from Microsoft sounds good in theory, but actually swapping everything out without a hitch is probably the hardest part.
29Anonymous2026-09-14 12:25
Half right. There's a ton of specialized software out there that integrates with Microsoft Office in one way or another, and replacing all those connections is genuinely hard.
13Anonymous2026-09-14 12:12
Honestly, I think that's pretty cheap.
14Anonymous2026-09-13 19:44
It says how much it'll cost, but it never says how much it'll actually save in the end.
30Anonymous2026-09-14 10:00
It's probably worth something like 110 billion 'bad' dollars. When the AI bubble pops and Microsoft goes under, the Swiss might end up being the only people who can still send email.
17Anonymous2026-09-13 19:43
A choice that's unavoidable, both ethically and strategically.
18Anonymous2026-09-14 10:19
This is just an experiment the Swiss Federal Chancellery is running with about 3,000 actual employees. I listened to an interview with the person in charge, and they seemed genuinely committed to making it work, which gives me some hope. That said, they also seemed well aware that an ordinary accounting-department employee switching smoothly from Word to LibreOffice is far from guaranteed.
19Anonymous2026-09-14 11:38
Any halfway decent-sized organization is already paying that much just in license fees.
22Anonymous2026-09-14 12:21
Good use of money. With American tech companies' terrible behavior being exposed again and again lately, going back to handwritten ledgers, filing cabinets, and the postal service would almost be cheaper.
23Anonymous2026-09-14 09:50
Open-source, decentralized alternatives are also a good thing in terms of breaking up concentrated power.
24Anonymous2026-09-14 11:37
Kind of funny when you consider Windows still can't handle file paths longer than 256 characters.
25Anonymous2026-09-14 13:29
It's actually impressive they kept running 2004-era Linux all the way to 2017. Linux and open-source software in 2026 are leagues ahead of where they were back then.
28Anonymous2026-09-14 08:33
So basically if they pay two years' worth this year, it's free forever after that? (I know it's not really that simple, and I'd like to see them keep funding open source the way other governments do.) It's rare to find a math problem this easy that still involves infinity and an inequality comparison.
32Anonymous2026-09-14 14:58
'Free forever after that' isn't really that simple. Microsoft's license fees include support, and that goes for Office and other products too, not just Windows. A free Linux license doesn't include that. If you want support for Linux (from RedHat, Canonical, etc.), that isn't free either.
31Anonymous2026-09-14 12:36
Chat is convenient, but if that's all you need, you could just spin up an IRC server.
34Anonymous2026-09-14 13:11
Right, that's probably the biggest challenge. It's not just about swapping the main apps — you have to replace all the little integrations and workflows everyone relies on day to day.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Munich’s “LiMux” project began in 2004 and was rolled back around 2017 after a combination of system glitches and political pressure, and it came up repeatedly in the thread. However, whether the rollback was mainly due to technical problems or Microsoft’s lobbying is disputed even among those directly involved, and it isn’t something that can be settled definitively from the outside. What’s happening in Switzerland now is a pilot program covering roughly 3,000 Federal Chancellery employees — it hasn’t been decided that this will roll out across every government agency. The estimate posted in the thread (“$36 per employee per month × about 38,000 employees,” or roughly $12 million a year) is just one example calculation; the original article doesn’t spell out the actual cost structure, including support fees. As for obstacles to migration, commenters repeatedly pointed to operational issues — integration with existing business software and employee familiarity — rather than the technology itself.
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