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How Microsoft Beat Linux In China

Posted by kdawson on from the always-did-know-the-value-of-being-the-standard dept.

kripkenstein notes an analysis up on TechRepublic detailing how Microsoft beat Linux in China, and the consequences of that victory: "With the soon-to-be largest economy standardized on Windows desktops, desktop Linux does seem to have an uphill battle ahead of it." "Linux has turned out to be little more than a key bargaining chip in a high stakes game of commerce between the Chinese government and the world's largest software maker... The fact that... Linux failed to gain a major foothold in China is yet another blow to desktop Linux. After nearly eight years of being on the verge of a breakthrough, Linux seems more destined than ever to be a force in the server room but little more than a narrow niche and an anomaly on the desktop."

3 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's always been like this by drooling-dog · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's been ready for my desktop for years; in fact I stopped dual booting with Windows a long time ago and haven't looked back. Almost every week I read about some critical thing I'm not supposed to be able to do with Linux (like deal with .doc files), even though I've been doing it without problem or fanfare all along. Did I not get the memo, or could it just be misinformation and FUD?

    I'm still amazed at the crap my Windows friends put up with on a daily basis, but they just regard it as the cost of doing business with their OS, I guess...

  2. Re:What battle? by westlake · · Score: 3, Informative
    You can examine it for backdoors, concealed reporting etc, which you cannot do with a proprietary closed source OS

    The Chinese government has had access to the Windows source code since 2003.

    Now when China uses Windows in President Hu's office, or for that matter in its missile systems, it can install its own cryptography. How Microsoft conquered China.

  3. Give Linux a good Chinese input method, first. by Rimbo · · Score: 4, Informative
    My in-laws are Chinese, and they can't stand Microsoft. The wife won't even put money into a mutual fund if she knows Microsoft's in it. Father-in-law can't stand 'em, either, and both have tried several different versions of Linux. I personally find Windows irritating to deal with, and use OSX and Linux exclusively.

    But they all came back to Windows, because there are Windows input methods and word processors for Simplified and Traditional Chinese that kick the pants off of anything available for Linux. The wife doesn't even care so much for Mac OSX compared to the one for Windows. And the fonts for Simplified Chinese in Fedora are mediocre at best, and awful at worst. Looking at a Google.cn search in Firefox on Ubuntu 7.04 is hideous even to my untrained eyes -- you see many characters missing, and the characters that are there look like a mish-mash of multiple fonts.

    So, if you care about this issue, this is what needs to happen.
    1. Go check out NJStar on Windows. Make something like that for Linux, but better.
    2. Go check out how the Windows Simplified Chinese works, and put that there.
    3. And steal some decent fonts for Linux and make sure your favorite distro has 'em.


    This is one of those times where we need to recognize that the better product won. And the only thing for us to do is to make ours better.