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Racing for loyalty from China's engineers

Racing for loyalty from China's engineers

As noted by other posters here:
* China has very bright engineers.
* Lots of consumer electronics are already manufactured in China.

As far as I can tell, what China DOESN'T produce is a fully functional MMX-compatible x86 core. This depends on foundry-tuned commercial VLSI CAD tools. It will have to come from the US. (Forget the 486; MMX is probably mandatory.)

The Chinese government initiated the Red Flag Linux project in 1999 or earlier, and promoted it in a big way. It is now shipping, but probably doesn't have a Chinese monopoly. Other Asian countries agreed to collaborate on their own version of Linux, and certainly haven't forgotten their big neighbor and potential market.

While AMD and Intel might try to sell Windows XP-based solutions from the US, it would be a lot easier (and probably more profitable) to sell just CPU chips, and let local Chinese engineers design the complete systems for manufacture.

Microsoft is already in China and will certainly market to Chinese designers. Among the selling points will be access to world markets, mature localized products in every country where commercial PC products exist. This will be very hard for the Linux community to beat.

So the future low-cost PC will have a US designed chip in a Chinese designed/manufactured PC sold by Chinese companies to the rest of the world. It will run either Windows or Linux. For its part, the Chinese government will mandate the Linux version, in which they have invested so much effort. But MS will get a large portion of the rest of the world.

But the Chinese PC probably won't be a Chinese monopoly. India will share in tech support.

Well... at least American and European tech support will come from India; Asian tech support will from China. Maybe the Chinese company will outsource US tech support to a mid-West call center, sustained by higher retail pricing in the US.

Posted by: asky   Posted on: 10/24/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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