14 DAY TRIAL // This isn’t the first time when Russia is planning to develop its very own software industry, but country officials now seem to be fully prepared to step away from foreign products by investing more money into local companies and products.
Communications and Mass Media Minister Nikolai Nikiforov said last week that Russia needed to concentrate more on domestic projects in order to obtain “complete sovereignty of information.”
Local newspaper The Moscow Times cites Nikiforov as saying that Russia wants to create “an entire industry of import-replacing software,” with large tech companies such as Microsoft and Oracle very likely to be impacted by these plans.
While stepping away from Microsoft software is a thing that can be done, and Munich is most likely living proof despite rumors that the Germans might actually return to Windows in the coming years, Russia has one big problem that could actually delay its migration efforts.
The country doesn’t have enough programmers to create a software industry of its own, so local authorities first need to invest in bringing more skilled IT workers on board and only then invest in products that could replace solutions coming from the West.
Nikolai Komlev, executive director of the Association of Computer and Information Technologies, told the aforementioned source that Russia’s IT industry could not exist without qualified specialists and, given the fact that the local IT education sector wasn’t really well developed, it could take more time until the country actually managed to get rid of foreign products.
Paradoxically, Russia might look overseas for workforce in this regard, so programmers from other countries could in the end be the solution for the country’s very own IT industry. While that might sound a bit weird especially because the country wants sovereignty of information without the involvement of overseas companies, it could actually help reduce the usage of products from Microsoft and other firms.
Alexander Shakhov, head of hiring in the IT/telecom group of recruiting agency Unity, explained that it could take at least 10 years until a new generation of Russian programmers was ready to help this project become reality, but state officials want this to happen in the short term, so waiting so much is obviously not part of their plans.
In particular, replacing Windows with any other operating system in Russia would take years, as statistics indicate that Microsoft’s modern OS is currently installed on more than 90 percent of the computers in the country.
A Linux-based platform is most likely the most affordable choice for the Russian government, but as was the case of Munich, it remains to be seen whether productivity would be affected in any way due to the differences between the two platforms.