And still, China wants to move to Linux ASAP

Jan 14, 2015 15:04 GMT  ·  By

China is one of the countries where Microsoft really has a hard time making its modern operating systems more popular, as authorities not only that started an anti-trust investigation against the company but they also banned Windows 8 on government computers.

At the same time, Chinese officials are trying to dump Windows completely in the country and are now pushing local users to Linux, an open-source alternative which, in their opinion, is much better and more secure than Microsoft’s operating system.

While this could easily be considered a subjective opinion, stats show that going from Windows to Linux is really a difficult thing to do for China, as no less than 97.1 percent of the country’s PCs are now powered by Windows.

Windows 7 powering 1 in 2 Chinese computers

According to data provided by StatCounter, Windows 7 dominates the desktop world in China with a share of 56.61 percent, while Windows XP is second with 32.67 percent.

Windows 8.1 and Windows 8 come next with 4.91 and 2.57 percent, respectively, while Windows Vista is far behind with 0.34 percent.

Overall, Windows has a total market share of over 97 percent, which does nothing more than to confirm that whatever China’s decision actually is, local consumers have no intention to step away from Microsoft’s operating system anytime soon.

And yet, one of Microsoft’s biggest problems in China, despite this impressive market share achieved by Windows, is the level of piracy, which more or less explains these figures.

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer previously said that 9 out of 10 copies of Windows installed in China were using a pirated license, so the 97 percent market share of the operating system shouldn’t be too surprising.

And yet, it will be very interesting to see the Chinese authorities convince consumers to switch to Linux, especially because the pricing advantage of the open-source platform is no longer relevant in this context.