Tuesday, January 3, 2006 |
10:36 - China and Microsoft: Peas in a Pod?
http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2006/01/microsoft_takes.html
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I guess it says something about my disinterest and softening on Microsoft lately that this comes as a surprise to me.
This part is interesting:
Can we say, snakepit? It’s actually not uncommon in China for people in one company to actively “tattle” on their rivals and get them into political trouble in order to gain a competitive business advantage. I saw it happen several times in the media and entertainment worlds when I was living and working in Beijing. This is one reason the communist party will stick around longer than many outsiders think. Businesses get greedy and try to manipulate the authoritarian system to their advantage, rather than working together to make the whole thing more fair, accountable, and transparent. Microsoft clearly isn’t taking the high road either.
I remember that MAD Magazine (the source for all my profound political insights in my adolescence, which ought to explain a few things) repeatedly caricatured Chinese society as a place where (for example) everyone misses important mandatory televised speeches because they're all out spying on their neighbors to make sure they're watching. The competitive spirit is very much alive in China; it's just been squeezed and mashed into unrecognizable forms by generations of hideous social experimentation, both foreign and home-grown, to the point where the tools of innovation—usable by the common man—are plagiarism and state thuggery. A free China would be an economic powerhouse unlike any the world has ever seen; if China hadn't been crippled by imperialism and Stalinism, I have to imagine it'd be far and away the world leader in invention and creation. I can only begin to imagine what the world would be like under those circumstances.
It'd be a great thing for that much freedom to be added to the world. But that would require the excision of many pernicious forces that seem dedicated to keeping Chinese society down, and Microsoft appears to want to be part of the problem rather than of the solution. I sure hope the money's good.
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