Beijing Snubs Microsoft For Municipal PCs' Software

jsse points to this Gartner article which says "that on 28 December 2001, the Beijing municipal government selected among seven vendors to provide operating system (OS), office automation (OA) and antivirus software for government PCs. Beijing selected six bidders, including Red Flag, but rejected the seventh bidder, Microsoft -- the only one that was not selected. Gartner listed several reasons why Microsoft lost the bid, but missed out the famous rumor that Microsoft has built a bad relationship with China since the first Chinese Windows 95, which was written by Taiwan programmers, contains Easter eggs carrying anti-communist messages."

Comments

The Microsoft remedy

[derekb]

Along the same lines as the Chinese Government adopting Linux, wouldn't it be a nice Microsoft remedy to see Linux adopted within the US Government as well.

Avoiding control by outside interests.

[Futurepower(tm)]

Microsoft has a history of doing what it thinks will make more money in the short term, even if what the company does is strongly against the interests of its customers. For example, the registry in MS operating systems is implemented in such a way that it provides copy protection, and also in such a way as to be a massive single point of failure.

Basically, when you pay money to Microsoft, you are paying money to someone who may decide to be your enemy. It is not surprising that a large organization would try to avoid that.

Also, there is the concern that the amazing number of security bugs in Microsoft software may be due to a deliberate intention of the U.S. government to provide points of entry for government spy software like the FBI's Carnivore.

I've gathered more than 600 pages of links from major news sources showing the U.S. government's interest in control: What should be the Response to Violence? It it any wonder that a foreign government would want to avoid being involved in this? The only downside is that the office tools are less capable. But the Chinese government's decision is support for closing the gap.

Re:funny...

[ImaLamer]

And I'm guessing your problem with this "communist" China is the fact that you're a Christian trying to promote your religion in a country that doesn't want you to come in.

Guess what, what we have here in America, where you can open up a 'synagogue' and confuse people into thinking it's actually a synagogue doesn't exist around the world.

I'm guessing this because you use this site to show the T.Square problem:
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sdc/tiananmen.ht ml
That group looks to be another "we don't have a ministry there yet" type of group.

If you want to bring democracy to China, that's great. You aren't going to do it though.