China is Moving Away From American Technology (Including Microsoft Windows)
THIS is a very important subject, often overlooked by the corporate/mainstream media as it might cause 'panic' or 'wish' Wall Street down. A lot of the corporate/mainstream media puts lipstick on a pig, hailing companies that are deep in debt and announce greater losses, spinning that as "investing in AI" or some other malarkey. Layoffs are, of course, just "replaced by AI", i.e. innovation in the making!
Andrew "bunnie" Huang, a widely regarded computer expert who worked with high-profile people including Edward Snowden, has just written a rare blog post "Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V" (in China) - a subject we've repeatedly covered here in recent weeks/months, even 3 weeks ago. We say "rare blog post" because he very infrequently writes blog posts anymore, except some challenges where people name the hardware in some photograph.
Huang's post is worth reading because it reinforces what we've been saying here for a while. Judging by some rough numbers, Baidu is peaking in China (Microsoft Bing is down again) and it seems like 'only' half the people use Chrome - that's far less than the rest of the world. Domestic (Chinese) stuff is gaining.
What's more relevant to us, however, is the relative share of GNU/Linux this month. It's estimated to be nearly 5%, compared to less than 1% (where it was stuck for many years). We took note of this change recently, e.g. [1, 2], but see the graph below. The pace of change seems to coincide with political tensions, ameliorated only in Australia thus far (despite allegiance/alliance with the West, Australia is isolated away and geographically closer to China). █
