Slashdot Mirror
The Intersection of Microsoft, Linux, and China
at_$tephen writes "Fortune magazine has an article stressing the Chinese market's importance to Microsoft's long term strategy, and touching on Linux's involvement in the Chinese market. In the early days of Microsoft rampant piracy helped establish it as the de facto standard in PCs despite good alternatives. History may be unfolding again here, with the exception that having the Chinese government as an ally has huge additional benefits. Or perhaps Gates has met his match with the Chinese government. 'In another boost for Microsoft, the government last year required local PC manufacturers to load legal software on their computers. Lenovo, the market leader, had been shipping as few as 10% of its PCs that way, and even US PC makers in China were selling many machines "naked." Another mandate requires gradual legalization of the millions of computers in state-owned enterprises. In all, Gates says, the number of new machines shipped with legal software nationwide has risen from about 20% to more than 40% in the past 18 months.'"
This is very good! The more businesses are forced to actually pay for all those MS loaded machines, the easier they might consider using linux.
Go Microsoft!
(This is why I wish copyright protection on software would be 100% succesful: Too many people just download software and keep using it that way, if this would be impossible a fraction of those would pay but many more will start searching alternatives...)
Dependency hell? =>
may be a horrible thing but it probably has something to do with this. That and Chinese getting richer. With 98/2k/etc you could used a burn copy of any MS stuff and it'd all work perfectly with Windows Update and everything else. Now with XP after WGA and especially Vista you can still crack stuff but it becomes more of a hassle if you care about what's on your HDD and want updates and whatever else. So I think these are the reasons the piracy is going down instead of Chinese people suddenly caring about their certificates of authenticity and 3 men holograms :)
It has been precisely the lax means and methods in Microsoft's anti-piracy efforts of the past that helped it to grow so quickly. illegitimate software was even counted in Microsoft's statements describing its market penetration and saturation.
Presently, Microsoft's copy protection has not only been shown to inconvenience legitimate users who upgrade their hardware and the like, but also makes illegitimate software distribution a great deal less convenient. And this is, obviously, to the detriment of Microsoft's present and future market penetration and saturation. Where once "alternatives" were a threat and even a previous reality [read OS/2], people are looking at alternatives once again in the form of Linux and MacOSX. These solutions do not offer the resistance that Windows offers and I think we can see clearly how Microsoft has managed to over-zealously shoot themselves in the foot.
By far the easiest solution for Microsoft would be to remove their copy protection schemes and just kind of look the other way for a while until their saturation once against builds the addictive dependency on Microsoft software that it is presently losing. It may mean some sort of decline in stock values or a leveling-out of revenues, but they would regain something far more important -- market saturation and monopoly control.
* Back then, Linux was about as friendly to the average user as a dominatrix on a meth jag; this had more to do with hardware drivers (or rather, lack thereof) than anything else.
* The other x86 GUI-based alternatives for the typical home user were... OS/2 (insert sarcastic mention of how developers 'loved' writing for it), Geos (well, if you used a Commodore), and, umm... not much else, unless you wanted to lay down some serious dough and buy a Macintosh.
Ease of copying coupled with an interface that really didn't require much in the way of brainpower was what gave Windows its boost.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The characterization of computers without pre-loaded software as "naked" and mandating that software be bundled with PCs by the retailer is nothing more than an attempt to create a barrier-to-entry into the market. Now, instead of creating your own operating system and just selling it, you have to negotiate with PC retailers (who probably have exclusive contracts with Microsoft) in order to be on the same footing as the more-established players.
That Linux and FreeDOS exist is a convenient workaround to the bundling requirements, but it doesn't negate the anti-competitive nature of Microsoft's "no software implies pirated software" BS.
I can buy a television without subscribing to cable TV service offered by Best Buy, why should a computer (for which there more options) be any different?
http://outcampaign.org/
If you read the article, you will see that forcing businesses to pay is what Microsoft started off by doing, quite unsuccessfully. Their usual heavy-handed strategy of suing businesses for pirating their software failed miserably, as the Chinese courts were not sympathetic towards Microsoft.
So, they finally changed their tactics, dropping prices dramatically. That's why they're finally making some headway in China. Oh, and some very active government lobbying seems to have played a big part as well. Microsoft seems to be best buddies with the Chinese government now, making deals with them, selling them software in huge quantities ...
Gotta love free enterprise. Corporations don't care where the money comes from; this is proved time and again by Western corporations sucking up to the Chinese government.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
However, there are downsides. Life in China by all account is not a lot of fun for most people. Access to things we take for granted is limited to the usual third world elite. It is not free trade is your problem, but the lack of democracy and knowledge about the rest of the world that China's people suffer from, and, I think, the acquiescence of the US population in their country being run by large businesses with monopolistic practices. If you had free trade, you would be able to buy those $3 Windows copies and the cheap medicines in the US. But you don't.
The difference between Adam Smith and Marx is basically that Smith lived in a world of tiny companies and thought capitalism was benign, while Marx lived in a world of growing capitalist monopolies and saw that it was not. What is happening in China is a repeat of the British industrial revolution - poor workers making an elite rich while being kept in a state of ignorance. Just as in the UK, some of those workers are more highly paid (the ones in the cities). How long before they start to get difficult? I really think that over the next thirty years we will find out whether in fact it was Smith or Marx who was right (my money is on Marx, as an economist you understand) and the laboratory will be China.
Pining for the fjords
when I was in China I frequently had market sellers attempting to sell me dodgy DVDs and CDs for 2 or 3 Yuan.
But I don't think they had windows on them...... yikes!
Seriously though, even in the large multinational Shenzhen office I was in the IT support guy installed windows of a shiny gold disc - it was just how things were done there. The serial number was written on the top in black pen. I guess product activation and WGA make it more difficult for this to work so they crawl back to the conference table and talk.
BTW. Many of the top executives from another multinational always impressed me by running Yellow Dog on a USB stick - I'm not even sure their laptops even had software on - but the USB sticks were on their key rings. I always thought that was a neat security idea. I have never seen that done anywhere else.
Ok, I get that /. readers hate Microsoft, but this is really a story about doing business in China more than how evil Microsoft is. The article really stresses how much Microsoft was hated when they tried the strong-arm tactics of selling (even more than in America) until they invested heavily in the country and opened a research center to change their image.
That really applies to all businesses trying to do business in China - particularly sales. It's actually quite an interesting story of business culture clashes and a good lesson on how standard US and EU business practices don't really work well in China.
Of course Marx wasn't right about everything and, as I made I thought clear, I wasn't talking about his political philosophy. Marx perceived that the effect of unrestricted capitalism was that ultimately all wealth would end up in the hands of a very few rich people. And that is incorrect how? He never suggested that the economy was static; Marx wasn't stupid.
It never fails to amaze Europeans that many Americans confuse consumer goods with wealth. Many American workers have few vacations and work long hours. They find it hard to save. They may have relatively large houses and cars, but in many ways they are still bonded workers. They cannot just leave their jobs and survive without very unpleasant consequences. To an Athenian or a Roman citizen, (or to an obnoxious Brit with no mortgage and money in the bank) that's slavery. And that's without considering the inner city subclass and the illegal migrants. In the US, a form of slavery is still very much in fashion, but people are in denial about it. Unfortunately we have allowed it to be exported to this country, with bonded laborers, many Chinese or Eastern Europeans, being controlled by gangs and the Government making sympathetic noises and doing precisely nothing.
Adam Smith believed that everybody would benefit from the invisible hand of the market - well, except a load of foreigners and poor people who did not count. Marx believed that the rich and greedy would, in the end, impoverish everybody else relatively speaking. Look at the US. Look at the reduction in status and opportunity for most of the middle classes, compared with the 50s and 60s.
In the late 50s my father bought his first house on one and a half times his salary. That house now costs more than ten times the average UK middle class salary. In those days there were few gadgets, but look at those gadgets now. They are basically small and cheap ways of delivering cheap content at high prices; iPods, mobile phones.
You're being screwed by monopolists while being told you're in a free market. And if you don't like Marx, read two prophetic books by three great US science fiction writers: The Space Merchants, by Pohl & Kornbluth, and Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut.
Pining for the fjords