http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-offices-in-china-raided-again-in-antitrust...China is again cranking up the pressure on MS -- tightening the vice on the "world's largest market kicks you out if you don't cooperate" fully expecting to get what they want which is a free XP replacement or else ongoing support for XP going way out into the future.
The other side of the vice is the fact MS has already laid off all the XP support people already and shut down the facilities, etc. "XP support" simply ain't there any more.
All MS can do is geek over a spyware back door free new Win 9 in some sort of free release.
Or else China will kick MS out of the country for good .....
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Is this a realistic credible threat?
Yes.Officially, China has already disallowed Windows 8 & 8.1 from all governmental machines. The official governmental OS is now Kylin, a "proprietary" crypto version of Ubuntu built for Chinese Military by Ubuntu --
built specifically to keep the NSA out of their machines. Kylin is in place and running right now but the encryption levels used in it are causing it to be too slow for a good personal choice as an OS.
Android and Google are a big issue with the Chinese government as well. Android outmasses all desktop OS instances by 100 to one in China, so you can see the Chinese feel the strong need to do something about that as well.
Twice now the Chinese government has attempted to fork Android into a Closed Source Proprietary mobile tablet and phone OS. In both cases Android evolved so fast that the OS was out of date within 3 months and was deemed "unusable" within a year.
http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/16/cos-china-operating-system/So, let's try twisting the arms of the real original software vendors -- if they want to be in our country they must obey our laws -- and our laws now say "no back doors, high level encryption must be available for all Chinese software."
Fact, due to the huge installed base of XP class machines in China, this huge mass of machines simply cannot be discarded. They need to keep running doing what they are doing right now to keep the infrastructure working.
So, twist MS's arm and
make them geek seems to be the way of it now.
BTW, Google saw the writing on the wall and has proactively closed all their Chinese offices and has already made their complete Chinese exit earlier this year -- but this is OK since Android had no banking/utilities infrastructure operating off of it.
Android is still flooding into China from all the device makers, but Google isn't there to get their arm twisted by a suddenly angry and politically active police state Chinese government.
Sorry, nobody to raid or place of business to harass.
MS could do the same thing.However, be aware that Google no longer controls the Android versions being used in over 30% of the devices sold so far this year in China. The handset vendors themselves are controlling their own Android forks instead.
Also note that this percentage will go up to closer to 60% by Christmas time. Independent Chinese app stores and the Russian app store Yandex are filling in for the Google Play Store and the various basic Google Services, which simply aren't on these phones at all.
HTC is a notable example of this new sea change. Xiaomi is another. Both communicate back to Bandu, Google's main Chinese ad competitor for their various ad services and back to their own servers for their cloud based services.
Example of a non-Google android version:
http://liliputing.com/2014/08/xiaomi-launches-miui-6-makes-android-look-like-...
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