Following the U.S. ban that prohibited domestic companies from supplying equipment to Huawei back in May, the technological Cold War between the U.S. and China just got a bit more intense now that Beijing has ordered all Chinese government and public-facing offices to replace any equipment featuring foreign components.
According to The Financial Times, China’s push to eliminate its reliance on foreign tech is part of a larger movement spurred on by previous policies like the Cyber Security Law that was passed back in 2017 and the Chinese government’s overarching Made in China 2025 directive.
The Financial Times says that based on estimates from analysts at China Securities, this would mean the Chinese government would need to replace between 20 to 30 million pieces of hardware. Substitutions are slated to start next year under the “3-5-2″ policy, which got its nickname due plan’s timeline of replacing 30 percent of foreign gadgets in 2020, 50 percent in 2021, and the final 20 percent in 2022.
The companies that will probably be hardest hit by this plan are large computer and server makers like HP and Dell and major chip makers like Intel and AMD. Microsoft could also take a beating because even though it created a special Chinese Government Edition of Windows 10 in 2017, it appears that’s not quite good enough now that China is aiming to replace Windows with a true homegrown operating system.
MacDailyNews Take: First of all, Windows has been “not quite good enough,” at best and usually much worse, for its entire horrid existence.
Given that the definition of “homegrown” tech in China is stolen U.S. intellectual property, often copied exactly and simply renamed, expect China’s efforts to pilfer needed IP from the U.S. to ramp up over the coming years.
well MS should brick all their OS’s in china just to say FU to everyone there.
MS is bad, but Apple is the IT department.
Whatever happened to the promise and idea of “self-healing” tech to make it more reliable? Windows has been in need of a complete rewrite for years from the ground up but MS is too scared of losing it’s business base. But that fear only means something else will eventually replace it unless they start simultaneously moving to a completely rewritten Windows II and transitioning from the crappy old to the less crappy new. Which would probably take at least a decade.
Doesn’t look good for Apple in China. The Chinese will just steal what they need as they always have.
Will China’s new OS be open source or closed? If it is closed source, no one outside of China will touch it, due to the obvious spyware and stolen IP risk.
But if it is open sourced, both Microsoft and Apple could be in real trouble. Making something “Better than Windows” is easy – it has always been inertia keeping those products outside the mainstream. And frankly, MacOS has gotten pretty neglected in the last few years – particularly the finder and quicktime.
Good riddance!! American tech companies don’t need your 1.4 billion customers.
If Mac users don’t make the move to Windows I really don’t see much likelihood that they would move to a Chinese equivalent. Can’t imagine any US Govt would just let such an OS infiltrate Into their market either especially if China is already Chinese only, the risks are almost unimaginable and in such matters the ‘free market’ becomes secondary.
Getting Mac users to switch would require:
1. China OS was open source, and thus trustworthy to be free of spyware.
2. It was actually better than MacOS.
Without 1, no one outside of China is going to touch this new OS. Given Apple’s neglect of the Mac lately, I think 2 is genuinely possible now.
AMD will be just fine.
Their Ryzen 3950X is currently selling out in Japan, and is going gangbusters in the rest of Asia.
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/amd-ryzen-9-3950x-going-on-sale-in-japan-looked-a-bit-like-an-iphone-launch
and Mindfactory.de is reporting that AMD cpu sales are far outstripping Intel in Europe.
https://hothardware.com/news/retailer-amd-ryzen-3000cpus-dominate-intel-diy-sales
With Intel releasing old 22nm processors to fill the shortfall of 14nm cpus, it doesn’t look like the situation will change much in the next 12 months.