14 DAY TRIAL // Despite its willingness to work with Chinese officials on addressing any privacy or security concerns that might exist in the country, Microsoft is actually experiencing more problems locally, where its products are gradually eradicated and replaced with domestic alternatives.
People close to the Central government have revealed for local media that authorities are now working to replace Windows with a locally developed operating system, most likely based on Linux, which would provide better security than Microsoft’s platform does.
Such a decision isn’t at all surprising, given the fact that the Chinese government had already banned Windows 8 earlier this year amid security claims, and authorities are now trying to get rid of Windows entirely and switch to an operating system developed by a local company which, obviously, can be controlled in a much more effective way, without any fear of keyloggers or anything like that.
And while the Chinese now want to replace Windows only on government computers, do not be too surprised if this decision is extended to cover the whole country, including companies and organizations that are running Windows on their computers.
Consumers are very unlikely to be affected, since this would be quite difficult to control, but there’s no doubt that if such a decision is made, Windows could gradually disappear from China.
A decision made against the United States
If you’ve followed this saga closely, you most likely know that Microsoft tried pretty much everything that’s possible to resolve the Chinese trouble and make Windows available not only to users, but also to government departments.
The company tried to cooperate with investigators for the anti-trust probe, and CEO Satya Nadella himself paid a visit to China to discuss their concerns and convince them that Windows is just as safe as any other locally developed operating system is.
All these efforts are very close to becoming just a waste of time because China goes on with its plan to eradicate Windows and replace it with its very own platform, currently at a government level, but very soon likely to expand to more users.
China is quite an eccentric country that tried to reply to the United States in the most uncanny ways whenever the Americans acted against it, so starting anti-trust probes against companies based overseas is a way to say that they won’t just sit and watch how other countries are making the rules.
This happened not only in the technology industry, and Microsoft is just one of the companies that are impacted by this long-distance fight, but Redmond has the merit of trying to solve the dispute in a very gentleman-ish way.
Piracy to the rescue
It’s a well-known fact that China is one of the countries where piracy has always been at pretty high levels, and Microsoft itself tried to tackle the black market by forcing local companies, organizations, and even government departments to switch to genuine copies of Windows.
Former CEO Steve Ballmer himself admitted that nine out of 10 Windows licenses in China are pirated, so it’s pretty clear that Microsoft is well aware of how things are going in the country.
But this high level of piracy might actually help Microsoft this time.
If China wants to eradicate Windows, this could be a really difficult, if not impossible, plan that’s likely to fail from the very beginning. Replacing Windows with a Linux-based operating system is undoubtedly a challenging process, especially because everyone in the country knows how to work on Windows, and the familiarity aspect is not something that can be ignored.
As far as government computers are concerned, where productivity is a critical thing, Windows is really a vital piece, so you just can’t replace it with a completely new OS and hope that everything will be fine.
For consumers, replacing Windows with Linux is clearly impossible in the short term, especially because the price advantage of the open-source platform is no longer valid if Windows is being used with a pirated license.
At this point, statistics show that Windows is running on more than 90 percent of the desktop computers in China, with Mac OS X and Linux barely powering a small percent of these PCs.
Windows, in its essence, is the operating system that powers China, and no matter if the government wants to get rid of it fast, that’s not going to happen. They could try it, but this is the kind of plan that’s just destined for failure.