If I remember correctly, Steve Ballmer came in person to München arguing for Windows, and he was most annoyed of one sentence coming again and again: "What else can you offer?"
They sure as heck did not want to see a bigger customer ditching them and having no big problems. This customer would have pockets deep enough to pay the admins they needed and the planning capacity to run the switch smoothly. After this, a lot more effort was spent on making things cloudy and SAAS, to make it even harder to switch.
Microsoft infra structure is a lot like tic-tac-toe. The only winning move is not to play.
In case of German Foreign Office afaik, they have the advantage of being Cloud averse due to state secrets certifications largely prohibiting it.
However the deep pockets are not for hiring sysadmins. They are primarily for hiring or rather bribing loyal friends who are plenty and very eager since they can't feed themselves outside of government.
Also there is another matter. To certify Windows for state secret matters is much easier than custom Linux solution
s.
Similar situation is developing around vmware. And that is no concern of cloud or SAAS - it is for on prem solutions. Broadcom hiked prices, everyone wants out but when you do the math it is not that easy.
German companies would prefer (sort of domestic) SUSE but the final bill seems to be the same at best.
Hint sheet of what priorities to offer to corporate or gov managers/buyers:
1. Responsibility avoidance - you sign with us we take the responsibility for downtimes
2. See above
3. See above
4. Low price...at the moment of signing. For annual hikes the signators will be long gone.
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1000. No need to hire or bother internal sysadmins/experts - as they are often opinionated, expensive and/or weird nerds.
1001. Functional/effective solution well integrated, modular etc.
