How Microsoft bought China

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Jul. 29, 2007

Opinion -- Some people seem to have a short circuit in their minds when they try to explain why Windows has such an enormous desktop market share. Some of them have the delusion that Windows is technically better than the competition. It never was. It isn't now. And, considering how Vista is staggering along, it never will be.

No, Microsoft wins because it does whatever it needs to do to win. If that means strong-arming the PC companies, so be it. If that means breaking the law, that's fine too.

To quote Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in his ruling against Microsoft in the United States versus Microsoft anti-trust case, "Microsoft paid vast sums of money, and renounced many millions more in lost revenue every year, in order to induce firms to take actions that would help enhance Internet Explorer's share of browser usage at Navigator's expense. ... In fact, Microsoft has expended wealth and foresworn opportunities to realize more in a manner and to an extent that can only represent a rational investment if its purpose was to perpetuate the applications barrier to entry."

That was in 2000. Fast-forward to 2007 and what do we find? Fortune reports that Windows is used on as many as 90 percent of China's 120 million PCs, because of piracy and because Microsoft's own prices have dropped so low that a student can now buy a combination package of Windows and Office for $3.

Meet the new Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft.

In discussions on Slashdot, there's the usual talk-talk about Linux, OpenOffice.org and other desktop open-source software options being not quite good enough, not quite compatible enough with Windows programs, and so on.

Come on, guys. The Linux desktop works just fine. The "Year of the Linux Desktop" isn't somewhere in the future. It was in 2005, when Novell came out with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 9.3.

This was, in my opinion, the first desktop Linux that had the right combination of ease of use, business-level support and features to be just as good a choice as any version of Windows for a company's desktop use.

You can, of course, argue that Linux doesn't have some particular program that you absolutely must have for your job. A favorite example of this sort is that Linux lacks a top-level, easy-to-use desktop graphics programs like Adobe Photoshop. Yes, Linux has GIMP, but no one has mistaken it yet as being easy to use.

What this argument ignores is that for 90 percent of all office workers, Linux does provide 100 percent of the application functionality they need. Usually about this time someone trots out the tired old argument that while OpenOffice.org can do most of what Microsoft Office can do, it can't run Office's VBAs (Visual Basic Applications) and macros, and since businesses depend on these, blah, de blah, blah, blah.

There's only one problem with this argument. It's not true. Thanks to Mono, you can run VBAs in Linux. In addition, Novell and Microsoft are specifically working on making it easy for users to migrate Excel VBA macros to OpenOffice's Calc.

When all is said and done, the real reason why Microsoft is "winning" in China and has won elsewhere is that Microsoft is willing to break the law, pay the fines, dump products on the market at far below cost, and continue on in the belief that in the long run the costs of doing business the Microsoft way will win out over the higher quality, security and features of Mac OS X and the Linux desktop.

—Steven J. Vaughan Nichols

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Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Except where otherwise specified, the contents of this site are copyright © 1999-2008 Ziff Davis Enterprise Holdings Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis Enterprise is prohibited. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.