The Great Geopatriation: Digital Endings Coming for Millions of Europeans Millions of Europeans to break from Windows

There are over 250 million installations of Microsoft Windows across European businesses and homes. According to Statcounter, the company enjoys a 72% dominance of the desktop operating system market. It has been a mainstay for decades; ever since Windows 95, it has been the preferred choice of PC customers. This means millions of people know nothing other than Windows to run their computers. Could recent changes in politics and policy inspire a European world without Windows?

How might such embedded success end?

In recent years, legislation has emerged across the world around data protection and security. GDPR arrived in 2016, protecting consumer rights. Other nations followed suit with their own versions, many of which demanded the processing of citizen data within their own borders.

This has had consequences for national law enforcement, who might require access to the data of criminals in other countries. In 2018, the US passed the US CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act). This allows the US to gain access to data on servers owned by US companies, even if they are on foreign soil. Usually, this would have little impact on the lives of global citizens as complicated international laws get resolved between countries. However, in the last year, strained international relationships have started to bring Digital Sovereignty to the foreground.

Geopatriation

Gartner’s trends report states that digital sovereignty is a trend happening across regions and will continue for many years. They call it Geopatriation. In an era of rising geopolitical risk, geopatriation refers to shifting workloads from global public clouds to sovereign or regional infrastructures to maintain data control, privacy, and compliance. This movement supports regulatory alignment and builds trust with customers and governments. Gartner insight: "By 2030, over 75% of European and Middle Eastern enterprises will geopatriate their workloads, up from less than 5% in 2025."

Europes response

The EU has become more focused, accelerating strategies around these issues. As of January 2026, the EU Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) has become the cornerstone of the region's push for Digital Sovereignty. This isn't just another regulation; it’s a manual for a massive, forced off-boarding of millions of customers.

The Act is built on three distinct pillars designed to decouple Europe from non-EU hyperscalers:

Triple Infrastructure: A strategic push to triple Europe’s data center capacity over 5–7 years, streamlining permits to build high-performance computing sites.

Carbon Neutrality: Mandating that this expansion occurs in a carbon-neutral way.

Trusted Sovereignty: Establishing a framework for Sovereign Clouds where data, services, and hardware reside 100% within European legal jurisdiction—a requirement that is becoming absolute for critical sectors like government and healthcare.

The consumer perspective

For most people, this is going to be the most boring homework assignment ever. As citizens in different regions move from one operating system to another, many will use a different computer interface for the first time in their lives. This is a massive "Role Exit"—a person who has been an "Excel Expert" or "Word Power-user" for 20 years is losing a craft-based skill.

Creating an ending that seems reasonable and understandable is hard enough; to create one based on international politics and regional security seems beyond many consumers' interests. In terms of consumer experience, complicated upgrades and installs have been smoothed out over time through background updates, but the fundamental "goodbye" remains un-engineered.

Three recent examples show the breadth of the task to undertake:

Service (Cloud Migration): AWS European Sovereign Cloud. On January 15, 2026, Amazon Web Services launched a physically and logically separate partition located entirely within the EU. This is an attempt to offer a transition to the old, integrated model while retaining the customer in a new, “sovereign” one. But will it work, when the same non sovereign company runs it?

Digital (Software Transition): The Danish Government. Denmark's Ministry of Digitalisation has begun a major exit, phasing out Microsoft Office 365 and Windows in favour of open-source alternatives like LibreOffice. This forces a mass off-boarding of tools that have defined "normality" for decades.

Physical/Digital Hybrid: Schwarz Gruppe. The retail giant behind Lidl has moved its digital operations to its own sovereign cloud, STACKIT, to reduce exposure to non-EU jurisdictions. They aren't just changing tools; they are building their own "Starting Experience" to replace an ended US one.

The challenge of the end

Shifting millions of people away from decades of established behaviour is no small task. This isn't just a technical migration; it’s a mass-scale ending of a digital era.

If US businesses are smart, they won't fight this with "dark patterns" or retention tactics that ignore the geopolitical reality. Instead, they should look at inspirational ending models. Creating a transparent, digital off-boarding that respects the consumer's new requirements for sovereignty. It would be easy to approach this as a normal situation of retention. But that is not a consumer option this time. 

For the European consumer, the "normality" of the last thirty years is finishing. We are entering a phase continental breakup. As we move toward 2030, the success of Geopatriation won't be measured by how many data centers we build, but by how well we design the endings of the relationships we are leaving behind.

After all, a sovereign beginning is only possible if we first master the commercial end.