Why China still runs on Windows

And what it means for Microsoft.

On May 29, Microsoft’s China division announced a new partnership with Tencent, building a pathway for publishing Tencent’s Android catalog on Windows. Tencent is best known as the company behind WeChat — a super-app that’s virtually essential in China — but it has a vast library of apps. It’s one of the world’s biggest gaming companies and runs QQ Music, one of the country’s most popular music-streaming services. Giving people a way to use Tencent’s apps on the desktop is a good idea, but if you’re not familiar with China, it might be a little surprising that the company is looking to Microsoft to do it. Given the rising political tensions with the U.S., couldn’t Tencent find a Chinese company to partner with?

But for the Chinese desktop market, Windows has become indispensable. It’s hard to get solid numbers on desktop OS usage in China, both because of piracy and general secrecy, but some analysts have estimated Microsoft’s share as high as 80%. Given the nature of Windows, that portion is probably heavily focused on offices and industry. With so much of the excitement and growth in the sector focused on mobile devices, there are few Chinese tech companies interested in challenging Microsoft in the desktop space, so there’s been no real threat to its dominance. If you’re making a product for desktops, you’re making it for Windows.

This is a slightly embarrassing state of affairs for the central government, which doesn’t like to be reliant on Western tech companies. Last year, Beijing even released an open-source operating system called OpenKylin with the express purpose of lowering reliance on Windows. But the new system doesn’t seem to be any more popular than Linux, and Windows is still more or less unavoidable. When China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology banned AMD and Intel chips in December, it only “discouraged” the use of Windows. Even amid a drive to be less dependent on American technology, government departments were given “some leeway” to use Windows, according to a procurement officer who spoke to the Financial Times.

For regulators on both sides of the Pacific, this is a familiar problem. Trade between the U.S. and China runs deep, and not everything can be severed in the rush to decouple. You block what you can without causing a crisis, and try to chip away slowly at the rest. In some cases, the chipping can go very slow indeed. The U.S. will pile tariffs on solar panels and EVs, but leave China-made laptops and cellphones untouched, understanding that it could take decades to build an alternative supply chain. If Microsoft is lucky, it may have fallen into a similar position in China — and outlasted its biggest rivals in the process.

Rest of Internet 

China is building its own low-Earth orbit satellite network, modeled after Starlink. It’s an understandable move, but given the sheer volume of satellites required, there’s a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. Hopefully there’s room for one more satellite network in low-Earth orbit?

Tracking the black market for Facebook ads in the Indian election. This is framed as election interference, but like most of these stories, the concrete impact is tricky to pin down. The bigger problem is that, after years of mea culpas, Facebook still can’t reliably enforce its own ad policies.

Leaked documents show thousands of unreported privacy incidents within Google. Particularly relevant for Exporter is a report that Google’s global security team was anticipating a surprise raid of its Jakarta offices in 2017 — a common form of government intimidation in Southeast Asia. There’s little detail on what actually happened, but it’s a reminder of how lively the international business world can get.

An Indigenous village in the Amazon is using Starlink to connect to the internet for the first time. The New York Times has a really interesting look at how internet access is changing this remote Brazilian community. Notably, the village isn’t quite as cut-off as it looks, and many of the people there have spent years living and working in nearby cities. The bigger question is whether an internet connection will make it easier or harder to sustain this way of life.

Today I learned 

Human traffickers are using AirTags to surveil their victims, according to a new report from Seamus Hughes’ excellent Court Watch newsletter. It’s a bleak story, but not that surprising given earlier concerns about how the product could enable stalking and domestic abuse.

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