China beware the big IT capitalist Microsoft

Stan Beer
Thursday, 20 April 2006 19:30

Opinion and Analysis

The past few weeks have revealed much about the great paradox that is China. It is a nation that wants a capitalist lifestyle with centralised totalitarian rule. The past weeks have also revealed a lot about the Western World's biggest IT companies, Namely, they'll do just about anything to crack the giant fortune cookie market. Some will give away their software, others will allow their search results to be censored and others may even be prepared to help the Chinese Government track down its dissidents. The more principled ones among us may say: "IT companies beware of the Chinese trap." I say: "China, remember your 19th Century history. IT capitalism is a far more powerful drug for an emerging technology nation than Opium."

The meeting between Chinese President Hu Jintao and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates may have seemed to some a polite symbolic gesture on the part of China to show that it is serious about adopting Western standards of intellectual property and proprietary ownership. However, coupled with the $1.2 billion sweetheart deal that Microsoft just announced with China’s number one PC maker Lenovo, the intent of the leader of the IT capitalists is crystal clear: lock in.

Microsoft, which has around 90% of the global PC operating system and office productivity software market, has achieved its remarkable stranglehold through a process called lock-in. Those of us, which is most of us, who have had the Windows operating system on our desktops for more than a decade, know all about lock-in.

We Windows users know all about the files we have created in Microsoft Office over the years, not to mention the numerous other applications that have been developed for Windows by software companies such as Adobe, Macromedia, and smaller independent software vendors. We know how we have come to depend upon those applications and the data attached to them.