content: It's not really that simple.  Multiple countries have tried this in the past, but Microsoft has a lot of leverage...  As said in another comment (somewhere in this post), Microsoft makes millions of dollars annually, even from small companies with their software and subscriptions.  Think about a MS Office subscription for a computer, on every computer, for an entire company... including mobile laptops and MacBooks... that's a lot of revenue for M$. When an entire government, or an entire country threatens to move away from MS Office products, Micro$oft threatens to take all of its jobs, all of its money, and all of its net worth out of that country and never return.  After all, it's usually the governments that pay for extended support for products like XP, even YEARS after support has stopped. So, for the US (for instance), that's a HUGE economic hit that we can't handle.  So, we're essentially being blackmailed into using M$ tools.