Comment by ronsor
16 days ago
The only reason Chinese companies can even get away with these big projects is because of state backing and state objectives. By itself, the market doesn't support a new general-purpose OS at this point.
16 days ago
The only reason Chinese companies can even get away with these big projects is because of state backing and state objectives. By itself, the market doesn't support a new general-purpose OS at this point.
> because of state backing and state objectives
MS is a state backed company. Very natural that China went the same path.
No it isn't
Technically you are correct but the commenter you’re responding to means that with the amount of Western Governments spend on MS products and services, the are a d facto (if not de jure) state backed enterprise.
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MS has deep ties into the state department and intelligence apparatus that few other companies do. Just as deep as the defense contractors who have a near monopoly-monopsony relationship with the federal government. You can argue about how exclusive they are in particular qualities but the scale and depth they operate at makes their relationship approximate the relationship Huawei does with the Chinese government. They're just what state-backed enterprises look like under liberal-ish capitalism.
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'China only succeeds for evil reasons'
Besides, the statement's completely nonsensical - there were multiple OSes developed by for-profit corporations in the West (Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, QNX, Be, etc.).
It's kind of an extraordinary statement that an OS couldn't be developed by a for-profit organization, especially if the hardware's somewhat fixed and you don't need to support every piece of equipment under the sun.
Actually the “market” won’t prioritize anything that won’t give returns as soon as possible (except for the weird situation of VC money being poured in).
You're downvoted but you're 100% correct.
It makes absolutely zero financial sense to create a new general purpose operating system.
That's billions of lines of code. With a B. And that's just the code - getting it to work with hardware?
Do YOU want to talk to 10,000 hardware vendors and get them on board? No! Nobody does! That's just money burning!
But, there are valid political reasons for creating a new general purpose OS.
It is a lot less if you are aiming to support a small set of platforms, don't need general driver support for everything possible accessory and peripheral under the sun, and if your file system usage is limited.
If you are building for a single abstraction, code gets much simpler, instead of building a platform that multiple abstractions can then be built on top of.
If you are China, the vendors are you and money is treated differently than in the west. Balance sheet will accommodate a project like that easily, especially if it decouples them from the US. They’ve already got their own software ecosystem which most people don’t hear about or heard once or twice, and it’s running their tech scene.
lol the market has tons of support for OS that can't be sanctioned, especially Huawei, who you know is.