Article/Observer.com Lv Dong Editor/Zhou Yuanfang
The operating system is regarded as the "soul" of the information industry. As with the semiconductor industry chain, the U.S. companies benefit from the first-mover advantage to build a moat, long-term domination of the global operating system market, China's electronics and information technology industry has been caught in the plight of the "lack of core and less soul".
In recent years, from the Win7 suspension to the ransomware virus, from the CentOS suspension to the shock of the industry Log4j2 vulnerability, operating systems and software industry security incidents, especially in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, highlighting the importance of having independent operating systems.
In fact, China has been exploring operating systems for more than 30 years, and there are at least 15 domestic operating systems on the market. But the only ones that have been able to stick to iterative versioning are Kirin Software, Unicom Software, and China Science and Technology Corporation (CSTC). At present, these three companies have completed the adaptation of the mainstream CPU and architecture, and gradually applied in the field of Xinchuang, finance, telecommunications, medical and other fields.
But in the consumer market, the domestic desktop operating system and Windows there is still a significant gap, the last five years in the domestic operating system market share of less than five percent, the ecological construction is also a little lack of. With the industry's "big wave of sand", the domestic operating system "three-legged" situation is more and more prominent, but ultimately who can rely on the independent ecological standout foreign enterprises, still need time to observe.
2015-2021 China's desktop operating system market share change chart Source: EYO Think Tank
In the entire electronic information industry, the operating system is considered to play the role of "bearing the top and bottom", both at home and abroad to adapt to the different CPU and chip architecture, support for mainstream hardware platforms and common peripherals, but also to build the top and bottom of the system, and to build the top and bottom of the system. The operating system is considered to be the "next in line" in the electronic information industry, and it has to adapt to different CPUs and chip architectures at home and abroad, support mainstream hardware platforms and common peripherals, as well as build the upper layer of middleware, databases, and a huge ecosystem of applications, which is crucial to the overall security of the computer.
Currently, Microsoft occupies an absolutely dominant position in the global operating system market. Data from third-party organization Statcounter shows that as of July 2021, Windows has a 74.79% share of the global desktop operating system market, much higher than other operating systems; in second place is Apple OS X, with a market share of 16.16%; Linux, ChromeOS, and so on, account for about 9.05%.
With users all over the world, Microsoft and other large companies have multinational, cross-departmental cybersecurity teams and real-time **** to enjoy the data and information, and some of the open-source projects don't even restrict third-party participation to update patches and fix vulnerabilities at any time.
But at the end of May this year, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a new regulation, when the U.S. entities and "restricted countries and regions" (including China and Russia, etc.) of the "government end-users" to share cybersecurity matters, you need to apply to the U.S. government, which means that
"The ****sharing mechanism is actually to promote the ****same **** to improve the ability to prevent, to maintain the network system, the security of the network world. But the U.S. Department of Commerce related regulations are based on the U.S. own national interests to limit the local enterprises to go outside the country, especially China to share cybersecurity vulnerabilities. To a certain extent, this is from the U.S. official point of view to block some of the original effective channels of cooperation, is certainly not conducive to international cooperation." Li Tianhang, a data compliance expert, told the Observer.
Throughout the development of Windows, its ability to quickly occupy the desktop operating system market mainly relies on the following three points:
First, the use of first-mover advantage to seize the market, through the long-term grinding with hardware and software manufacturers, self-developed applications, the first to build a systematic ecological scale, the formation of a large user group; second, hardware and software bundling to form the Wintel Alliance, firmly The first is that the Windows system has been designed and built to be a systematic ecological scale, forming a huge user base.
After 40 years of development, with a strong hardware and software ecosystem, the Wintel Alliance, and constant iterative updates, Windows has also formed a near monopoly in the desktop operating system market. 2018, Microsoft has announced the number of Windows apps, which can be said to be overwhelming compared to other desktop OS platforms: the number of Windows 10 monthly active devices exceeds 7 billion units, more than 35 million adapted apps, more than 175 million software versions, and 16 million hardware/driver combinations.
From the development of Windows, it is easy to see that ecology is an unavoidable keyword for operating systems. For the domestic operating system, the most core, the most concerned about the user experience is the system is adapted to the application of the ecological. It is easy to build a system, but difficult to build an ecosystem. Over the years, many domestic operating systems have been unable to form a virtuous cycle due to a lack of ecosystems, and have eventually been eliminated from the market.
The difficulty of building an ecosystem is that, for historical reasons, a lot of hardware and software is not adapted to the domestic operating system, and a lot of foreign industrial software is only available in Windows versions, which are not adapted to the domestic system, so the domestic system needs to be adapted in reverse.
Some industry insiders bluntly said that most of the domestic operating system is based on the open source operating system Linux kernel distribution. Based on Linux development is no problem, the key to have no penetration of the Linux kernel, as well as whether to fully invest in resources for commercial applications to adapt.
Adequate application adaptation and analysis of the Linux kernel, operating system vendors do not have more than 10 years of accumulation is difficult to achieve. Incomplete statistics, in many domestic operating systems, continued iterative release of 15 years of only three in China, the Fondel, UOS, Galaxy Kirin.
Accompanied by the East counts the West counts, the new infrastructure and other favorable policies have been launched, China Science and Technology Frontier, Unicom UOS, Galaxy Kirin recent action frequently, in the ease of use of the operating system, the stability of the ecological aspects of the continuous coding, is gradually from the "can be used" to "good use". "The company's website has been updated with the latest information.
Kirin Software is known as the operating system "national team", at the end of 2019 by Tianjin Kirin and the integration of software, the company released the Galaxy Kirin operating system V10, was named "2020 annual central enterprises of the top ten national weapon". The company released Galaxy Kirin OS V10, which was named "the top ten national important weapon of central enterprises in 2020". Entering 2022, Kirin Software has successively cooperated with Longxin, Zhaoxin, Unicom, Wave, Xinhua San and other enterprises, and the number of adapted products has exceeded 400,000.
Unisoft was founded in November 2019, by Chengmai Technology and other operating system manufacturers **** with the capital to form. 2019 to 2021, Unisoft UOS adapted products reached a total of 200 + million. In May of this year, the company announced that it would take the depth (deepin) community as the basis for building a desktop operating system root community based in China and facing the world to create a Chinese desktop operating system root system.
Zhongke Fangde's technical team, whose work dates back to 1999 and whose shareholders include Dawning, CAS Software Research Institute, currently has a product line of server operating systems, desktop operating systems, and other tools for cloud computing and highly available clustering software, focusing on e-government, communications, finance, education, education, culture, health, energy, transportation, and other industries and fields. Recently, the company has been selected by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology as a technical support unit for the Xinchuang Vulnerability Library, and has been certified as a national key software enterprise.
On June 17, Fondel will release the latest 5.0 version of Fondel desktop operating system, which is the company's first "public development of the new" over the years, the new product will focus on improving the user experience, the introduction of new features, to create a new platform for the integration of ecological. In addition, Fondel will unite with industry partners to release an integrated solution for industrial design to enhance the user experience. According to reports, the Fondel desktop operating system is pre-installed with a software center, which has been uploaded and operated by nearly 2,000 domestic software and open source software.
In the face of the huge operating system market space, after decades of exploration, the domestic operating system is gradually starting volume. Industry data shows that in 2021, China's Linux desktop operating system shipments for the first time more than 5%, it is expected that by 2025, China's Linux operating system shipments will be more than 20%, China's overall market share of more than 10%, China will become the largest Linux desktop market, with the development of an independent ecological basis, leading the development of the Linux desktop system capacity.
There are also views within the industry that the operating system will have a leapfrog development opportunity every twenty years or so, the computing environment has changed a lot, the operating system will follow the update, and guide the corresponding application scenarios to show an order of magnitude growth, the formation of a rich industrial ecosystem around the operating system, and the Kirin software, the letter of the software, the Chinese operating system such as the Fonda is in the cycle of the future performance is worth looking forward to. The company's newest product is a new generation of mobile phones, which will be used in the future.
This article is an exclusive contribution from the Observer.