China plans to grow several industrial ecosystems to support global reach including… “the electronic information industry. 2015 form 5-8 large backbone enterprises with sales of over 100 billion yuan, and strive to cultivate large enterprises with sales of over 500 billion yuan.”
see Guidance on corporate mergers and acquisitions to accelerate key industries release.
The strategy appears to be to skip growing individual businesses by merging already growing businesses to suddenly reach global scale. This could increase efficiency and maximize profits for China. Shaky global corporations like PC-OEMs and M$ could be in for a rough ride if China goes with GNU/Linux on PCs in a big way. Could Linpus Linux be one of the businesses involved in mergers? They already have Lenovo. Perhaps they will merge all the small players into a competitor to Lenovo or have Lenovo be the root of the tree. We shall see … soon.
see also The Register’s take on this news.
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Internet connectivity, or at least really high speed connectivity (the kind of speeds you need for multi-GByte Linux distribution downloads) is spotty, as it is throughout most of Asia and the Pacific.
The Chinese government mostly distributes Red Flag Linux as a stack of DVD’s. It strongly encourages computer retailers, internet cafes, and ISPs to use it. Chinese government offices and enterprises get a stack of official copies.
Downloads only represent a small fraction of the numbers of Red Flag Linux systems in use.
ram wrote, “There are more Linux users in China than there are people in the USA! Think about it!”
Not that many so far. Red Flag Linux has 12million downloads. So it could well exceed what Dell has done with Canonical but if smart thingies are included ram could well be right.
“Red Flag Linux Desktop 7.0 2009/07/30 iso Download 12300154″
Eh mate,… China is already a Linux user in a big way. The PRC government ‘seriously endorses’ the use of Red Flag Linux:
http://www.redflag-linux.com/en/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/dec/04/linux-microsoft
They have been doing so since at least the year 2000:
http://www.redflag-linux.com/en/about.php?class1=1&class2=2
There are more Linux users in China than there are people in the USA! Think about it!
Linux has won, and not just on mobile devices.