If you’ve been closely following Linux news, you may have heard about Germany dumping Windows in favor of Linux on over 25,000 PCs last year. At that point, the community predicted that many other countries might ditch Windows for Linux. The prediction was pretty much on point as China recently announced that it’ll be ditching Windows for Linux on over 50 million PCs!
While the end goal of both the countries is the same, their reasoning for doing the same differs. Germany did it so that the government could save on licensing costs and promote open-source. China’s doing it to “remove foreign operating systems” so that they could maintain the OS in the country.
While this is a big win for Linux and open-source software, it’s bad news for laptop/PC manufacturers like Dell, HP, etc., and software companies like Adobe and Microsoft, except Lenovo and Kingsoft. While manufacturers will be driven into the corner to become “foreign” companies, homegrown companies like Lenovo, Huawei, and Kingsoft might see rapid market growth in the forthcoming years.
Here’s what the Bloomberg intelligence says.
Lenovo could dramatically boost sales on Beijing’s order that central government agencies and state-backed companies replace foreign-branded computers, as reported by Bloomberg News. This would amount to more than 50 million PCs over the next two years. The nation’s No. 1 PC maker relies on U.S. chips, but has set up its own chip-making unit and invested in at least 15 semiconductor design firms.
Nathan Naidu, Bloomberg analyst.
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