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Comment by gravescale | Hacker News Reader

Silicon aside, it really seems that China of all places should be all in on replacing Windows as the defacto standard OS. Everything in the country runs on Windows (even the police stations use it) and the ubiquitous apps like WeChat, WeCom, Tencent Meeting etc, only have Windows, Mac and phone clients.

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WeChat and WeMeet are actually available on Linux, so this is only partially true. Edit: I've noticed that officially, it's only available on Kylin for some reason. I guess this is where the confusion arises, but I don't see why people can't just make unofficial packages for other distributions and they probably do already. I just didn't bother checking.

I guess that's better than nothing, but the Kylin WeChat binary is from 2021, so it's not evidently a first-class option.

If they want to export software they need access to the international software platforms (windows, osx, android, iOS)

That's a blinkered approach. The whole sentence you should have written is:

"If they want to export software to Western Countries they need access to the Western software platforms (windows, osx, android, iOS)"

But the problem for the West is that Western countries comprise a mere one-eighth of the world's market. The West is literally a niche market. The Chinese market ALONE is larger the WHOLE of the West.

The Chinese approach is "Most of the World can use use software which doesn't need access to the Western software platforms (windows, osx, android, iOS)"

The American "World Series" is not, it's just a regional sport.

Yes, but my point is it seems a jolly strange thing to do to weld, conservatively, 100 million people, including pretty much your entire state adminstration apparatus as well as the technical baseline of a very large proportion of your IT industry to a foreign proprietary OS from your biggest geopolitical rival that could be cut off by the other side in a dispute.

I guess technically this actually applies to any country, but China's the obvious one where it could vaguely plausibly actually happen one day.

Not basing almost your entire country's IT on Windows also doesn't preclude you participating in the software export market.

Though actually they do seem to have started the process, so we'll see where that goes: https://www.techspot.com/news/102379-china-bans-intel-amd-pr...

> I guess technically this actually applies to any country, but China's the obvious one where it could vaguely plausibly actually happen one day.

It has already happened in Russia: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/03/04/microso...

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