China’s communist party mouthpiece and most widely-read newspaper The People’s Daily has run an article from a prominent scientist urging the country’s government to adopt an antitrust law and researchers to develop a domestically-produced computer operating system. In an attack on Microsoft Corp’s domination of the Chinese information technology industry, Professor Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences says it is necessary to act now to prevent Microsoft gaining similar dominance over the rapidly evolving information appliances market with its Windows CE operating system and Venus project.
Pointing to the recent US agreement between Microsoft and AT&T, under which Microsoft will invest $5bn in AT&T and the telecoms operator will use the CE operating system in up to 10 million set-top boxes, Ni said: For Microsoft, spending $5bn is just a casual demonstration of its capabilities. For Mr Gates, the information appliances market in China is just as important as in America. If he can invest $5bn in the US market, he will not hesitate to do the same in China’s market.
Saying that testimony from numerous companies at the antitrust hearings in the US show that Microsoft’s operating systems monopoly has stifled the development of other enterprises and technologies, he urged China to learn a lesson from this and enact an anti-trust law of its own as soon as possible.
Hand in hand with this, he urged the creation of an indigenous operating system to compete with Windows CE to prevent it from becoming the de facto standard because it has the largest market share. He said there is a feeling in some quarters that the Chinese should just do business, and they don’t need to develop technology thus allowing Microsoft to maintain its technological hegemony through the generations.
But he said, in a call to arms typical of the newspaper’s revolutionary rhetoric: To avoid being monopolized and bullied, China should exert great efforts to develop science and technology, especially core technologies like operating systems. It would be a shame if China, a big country with a population of 1.2 billion, gave up on the development of its own operating system, or developed it at too slow a pace. The heroic spirit that was once needed to develop the H-bomb, the atom bomb and the satellite years ago is needed again to accomplish this task.
