< I'm thingking $50 per laptop to get patches for a year. < Dave
Fifty bucks a pop. This is a very interesting number. Although twice retired (the second time definitely for real and for good), I still travel quite extensively to the Greater China area (兩岸三地). There are two numbers that I keep hearing a lot about during my visits there, they happen to have the same absolute value. One is that there were more than 100 million stock brokerage accounts that were opened this past 12 months. Another is that the PC industry projects 100 million new PCs a year in China, a good portion of them will be desktop replacement notebooks (DTRs). These two events may be related as it is expected that these newly minted investors may be interested in using their PCs to do on-line trading. Security becomes their concern, perhaps the utmost concern (as evidenced by the fact that virus protection programs have become the most popular software in China). Another new development is that, after August 20 of this year, Chinese are now allowed to trade Hong Kong stocks from their bank accounts in Tianjin (天津). This announcement helped the Heng Sheng index to balloon by more than 40% (or about three quarters of a trillion USD in total market cap) in two months. This event registered vividly in my mind as I remember I was puzzled when some time before this happened, a Tianjin city official asked me how I think about Solaris. Now I probably know why. Solaris and a secured PC. There may be a connection. It does not hurt that Sun's Solaris development team has wisely decided to design Solaris to be "secure by default". 100 million Solaris licenses at $50 per license per year? We know this will NEVER happen. (I am fully aware of the SEC regulations and want to make sure that it is clearly understood that these numbers are merely hallucinations, something created from vacuum and have no basis whatsoever). However, as I mentioned in a separate thread, during China's 17th Party Congress just concluded two weeks ago in Beijing (this is the MOST important event in China; it elects new party leaders and sets the directions of the government for the next five years), the Phoenix TV (鳳凰電視台, the Chinese version of the CNN), used a screenshot of Sun's campus that contains a very conspicuous Sun's logo to demonstrate that the new generation of China's top leaders--mainly the 25 Politburo members--are taking IP matters seriously. Two other companies were similarly featured--Ericsson and Schlumberger, but Sun's logo is the most prominently visible. I am definitely making too much out this purely coincidental happening, but it at least shows that Sun's name is not an unfamiliar one in China. So, we have Sun's name (by itself and as owner/creator of Java), which appears to be a very favorable (& very big) one, plus Sun's long-time investments in GNOME and OpenOffice.org, and Sun's philosophy of designing Solaris to be "secure by default". All these make Solaris look very good. How far it can go, no one can predict, but, unless the self-proclaimed "OpenSolaris community" screws it up*, it should make us feel honorable to try to push for a Solaris solution in China. * I wish someone could explain this to me: I saw a proposal from the so-called "OpenSolaris community" to disband/dissolve the Desktop community. This matter has actually been taken up by an OGB member and AFAIK is still being heatedly discussed. All this happened because someone felt betrayed because the desktop community, of which I believe I am a member, happened to sponsor the Indiana project. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
