Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Tariffs Are Accelerating Microsoft's Decline in China

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 10, 2025

Hours ago: HarmonyOS replacing Windows in China

Last month: Chinese OEMs (and World's Largest) Pave a Path Out of Microsoft Windows

Two months ago: Expect GNU/Linux to Rise Sharply in China

Last year: Expect Microsoft Windows to Nosedive in China, Just Like in India

The sister site will be 21 very soon. Back in 2004 few of us could envision high tensions with China and a "rift" this big, leading to a sharp split across "tech stacks".

A few years ago Microsofters mocked the Chinese government for saying it would eliminate Microsoft within years. Some of them even spread mock 'news' about it. We still remember the ridicule and the strident scorn.

Vista 7 is still ubiquitous in China:

Desktop Windows Version Market Share China

An abundance of machines that cannot run Vista 11, not just due to a lack of TPMs but also low capacity.

Judging by the way things are going, there will be considerable adoption of GNU/Linux in years to come, China being one major contributing factor.

The higher the tariffs, the more China will adopt its own products, both for hardware and software.

"Absolutely," Ryan says in IRC. "Probably in the US too. Not just the Windows tax, but the fact that they INCREASED the requirements for Windows 11 which makes the computers more expensive, which means higher tariffs. So people will turn to smaller computers that are cheaper but run Linux okay. This seems to happen in every country where money is not abundant. And Trump's policies create that effect where money is not abundant and what you have doesn't buy much. These tariffs are rat poison for Microsoft's entire business. Because everything they need to sell gets more and more expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if Xbox starts puking up so many write-offs because of the tariffs that it gets lopped off. You raise that price enough for the hardware, accessories, games (which no longer have a production cost or tariffs because they're downloads), then eventually people just won't have games, or they'll do what I do and install retroarch and be happy with some emulators that even a Chromebook can handle. I mean, consider this. The 80s and 90s weren't MISERABLE and we had far less technology than we do today. We have more technology now than at any point in history, and life has gotten completely miserable, partly because of the technology. It's advanced, but that's part of the problem. It's advanced to the point where it makes hurting people badly with it, not only possible, but very cheap to do. People who develop the things that cause this to happen should be ashamed of themselves. Too ashamed to brag about it, certainly. I really can't find a reason to care when Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, all these companies, have mass layoffs to hide the fact that it's not going so well internally. The better they do, the worse life gets. We got along fine when almost nobody even had a computer in the house. People couldn't ignore their neighbors and radicalize on porn and Fox News. When people started getting the Internet in their home it wasn't that bad, because the early adopters of things tend to be smarter people. Then it becomes available to the masses, and they figure out how to make everything much worse. I miss 20 years ago, you know, when there were no smartphones. We didn't need them. We still don't need them, there were smartphones 20 years ago. Not like the ones now. If you had one it was probably a Blackberry. They tried to hold on by porting an Android compatibility layer to Blackberry OS. But it didn't work."

China has its own operating systems for mobile devices, but Android still dominates.

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