Curious how many students and faculty at your university are served by that $2m/year?
I don’t disagree with you, but if I were the CTO of a 10000+ seat organization, and a Microsoft/Google/etc told me they could provide email, storage, sharing/collaboration, office apps, security etc for a few bucks per user / month… that’s a pretty compelling deal.
And the idea of a university rolling its own office apps suite to provide local employment sounds like the sort of decision likely to end up in tears, or at least in students relying on Excel and Word on their own computers anyway
Most people wouldn't end up with rolling their own, but contracting existing support providers or developers.
E.g. for Excel and Word replacements there is LibreOffice, and any number of companies offer more polished packaged up LibreOffice variants and surrounding services. One example is Collabora in the UK[1]. In that respect the effect would be to shift revenue that currently mostly leaves Europe to companies closer to home.
The biggest hindrance is that if you do too much of that and you'll get the US and others doing the same thing in return, whether in the same sectors or entirely different sectors.
I don’t disagree with you, but if I were the CTO of a 10000+ seat organization, and a Microsoft/Google/etc told me they could provide email, storage, sharing/collaboration, office apps, security etc for a few bucks per user / month… that’s a pretty compelling deal.