Hu and Gates prove money speaks louder than politics

Stan Beer
Thursday, 20 April 2006 10:41

IT Industry - Development

The meeting today between Chinese President Hu Jintao and Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates, demonstrates in no uncertain terms that when it comes to doing business - especially in the highly competitive IT industry - money speaks louder than political principles. The words political censorship, rampant software piracy and human rights would not have sullied the meeting between the two men.
Instead we heard platitudes such as Hu is a friend of Microsoft and Gates is a friend of China. And of course, why wouldn't Mr Gates and company want to be a friend of China at all costs when a market of hundreds of millions of PCs is at stake. Microsoft shareholders are not interested in the internal politics of countries with a market of 1.3 billion people who can add to the bottom line of their investment.

Not that Microsoft is alone by any means. Google is quite happy to go along with the censorship of its search results if it means that its search engine will be on the home page of Chinese desktops. There has even been a report about Yahoo! helping the Chinese Government track down a dissident. Such is the power of the purse strings of the world's next superpower.

From Microsoft's point of view, having the President of China to lunch at Bill Gates' residence is more than simple diplomacy and relationship building. It's also more than persuading the President to get serious about enforcing anti-piracy laws and prohibiting thye sale of naked PCs. What it's really about is buying access to potentially the world's biggest PC market at the expense of the biggest threat to the Windows operating system, Linux.

The consensus among Linux advocates is that Microsoft will succeed in slowing the growth of Linux in China for the short term. With deals, like the $1.2 billion contract struck with Lenovo yesterday, Microsoft is prepared to practically give away its software just to keep Linux at bay. However, long term, the Linux crowd believes the end result is inevitable. With the whole world moving toward open source, they say, China will follow.