Three quarters of digital work environments in France today rely on Microsoft.
This figure comes from Lecko’s annual survey (The state of the art of internal transformation) carried out in partnership with Ipsos among 500 employees at organizations with more than 250 staff, and it opens the section devoted to digital sovereignty.
However, the most interesting finding isn’t the domination of Microsoft (a long-known fact) but what the study’s authors call a satisfaction that “isn’t worth endorsement, nor the ability to switch.”
In the public sector, the use of an alternative to Microsoft or Google concerns only 14% of respondents, according to the survey.
An apparent total standardization. Yet 60% of the respondents admit turning to personal tools (WhatsApp, WeTransfer, Box) to sidestep the perceived limits of their official tools.
Lecko concludes that organizations already no longer fully control the uses inside the very solutions they have massively deployed.
This paradox threads through the rest of the analysis.
The level of self-reported satisfaction with digital environments (email, video conferencing, office tools, cloud storage) is considered satisfactory by respondents, but Lecko cautions against a too quick reading of the result.
This satisfaction would reflect less the intrinsic quality of the tools and more a habit formed around solutions that have become indispensable in daily work. When asked about the possibility of replacing them with sovereign European suites, respondents show nuanced positions, a relative majority voicing reservations about effectiveness and continuity of work.
The priority claimed by users is therefore not sovereignty as such, but tools that meet their needs.
Three lock-in mechanisms identified
Lecko structures its diagnosis around three “points of tension” that drive dependency.
The first concerns the bundled-offer logic that Microsoft has deployed for about fifteen years: the shift from perpetual licenses to subscriptions, the proliferation of pricing tiers, the gradual phasing out of on-premises hosted solutions in favor of the cloud, and above all a stacking of components (mail, security, compliance, telephony, artificial intelligence) that makes any partial exit very difficult.
The study recalls that the forced integration of Teams into Office 365 even earned Microsoft a sanction from the European Commission for abuse of dominant position, and that the arrival of Copilot in certain professional offerings extends, according to Lecko, this same confinement dynamic.
The second tension point concerns prices. Lecko puts European Microsoft 365 price increases at more than 10% per year on average in recent years, with notable revisions in March 2022 (ranging from 9% to 25% depending on licenses and zones) and then in April 2023.
The study also notes a second mechanism: Microsoft invoices its European customers in dollars, exposing them to exchange-rate volatility that compounds the price hikes. An additional variable, independent of the price policy proper.
Finally, Lecko emphasizes that these successive increases are not systematically justified by the addition of new features or an improvement in service. They would reflect more of a strategy to valorize the suite and capture value in the market.
A price rise outside of control
The study illustrates the cumulative effect with a concrete example. Over five years, an organization subscribing to an E3 offer would have seen its total cost rise by nearly 50%, due to price revisions and the addition of mandatory components. The study likens this phenomenon to a frog failing to notice the gradual rise in the water temperature surrounding it.
The third tension point is legal: the extraterritorial reach of American law. The study cites the Cloud Act of 2018, which obliges any American company to hand over data to authorities even if it is stored outside the United States, and the Patriot Act of 2001, which authorizes access to certain data for national security purposes.
European organizations using American cloud solutions thus face a risk of data transfers outside the European legal framework, without those directly affected necessarily being informed.
The study also notes a potential clash between GDPR obligations and the Cloud Act.
A mature alternative market in some places, immature in others
Faced with this triple finding, Lecko describes a French and European market for sovereign alternatives that is accelerating, driven notably by the public programs France Relance and France 2030.
Historically, this market has been built “brick by brick,” i.e., a sovereign alternative for each Microsoft product, following a logic Lecko terms a “generic drug.” In other words, a substitution solution often less integrated or functionally rich than the original.
Some segments remain, as the study itself admits, “bastions of dependency.”
The first is identity management and federation (Azure Entra ID, ADFS, Active Directory). Migrating to solutions like Keycloak, LemonLDAP, or WALLIX Trustelem implies heavy impacts on SSO, MFA, and conditional access.
The second is the operating system, where switching to Linux remains marginal due to application compatibility and user acclimatization.
The third is the workstation itself. There are alternatives, but the field shows it is still too early to do without Windows in most professions.
The user experience constitutes the “last, solid bastion” of dependency, around three pillars. The first is email, where sovereign alternatives (BlueMind, Zimbra, Infomaniak) are credible, but migration remains complex in terms of volume and habits.
The second is word processing and spreadsheets, where LibreOffice and OnlyOffice cover the core needs, but macros, pivot tables, and advanced formats often require coexistence with Microsoft tools for an extended period. The third, more broadly, is the file format itself. On this point, the “La Suite” developed by the DINUM, with its Docs offering, is cited as an example of an alternative that, though incomplete, centers user experience in its proposition.
The report highlights French publishers positioned with a different approach from mere one-for-one substitution. Jalios, Jamespot, Talkspirit, Wimi, eXo Platform, and BlueMind are presented as players seeking to reconnect the digital environment to actual team usage rather than simply reproducing the functional stack of American suites.
To synthesize the entire market, Lecko proposes a three-circle map: a mature market offering real alternatives, a niche market, and a market still neglected.
A method rather than a dogma: tiered rollout by priority
On the question of “how,” Lecko recommends a batch-based approach rather than a wholesale switch. Several perimeters are already mature and validated by experience: document management (GED), collaborative spaces, and intranet portals. Sovereign messaging provides a ready functional base, but its migration and the management of habits (delegations, calendars) constitute a project in itself.
On the office suite, the sovereign alternative covers 80 to 90% of everyday needs; for complex cases (macros, business templates) a coexistence with the Microsoft tools will be required. Finally, the infrastructure (IaaS, storage, network) can migrate progressively, domain by domain, to SecNumCloud-qualified providers.
Yet the study is categorical on one point: the true core of dependency lies in business applications (finances, human resources, relationships with users, urban planning) that are largely designed around the Microsoft ecosystem (SQL Server databases, Graph API, authentication).
As long as these chains remain anchored to Microsoft, Lecko writes, sovereignty over the workstation alone will not suffice to regain real control.
