Thursday, October 17, 2013

NSA Revelations Kill IBM Hardware Sales in China

I’d warned about its impact at the time [read.... US Tech Companies Raked Over The Coals In China]. Snowden’s revelations started hitting in May. Not much later, the Chinese security apparatus must have alerted IT buyers in government agencies, state-owned enterprises, and major independent corporations to turn off the order pipeline for sensitive products until this is sorted out. As Mr. Loughridge’s efforts have shown, it’s hard to explain any other way that hardware sales suddenly collapsed by “40%, 50%” in China, where they’d boomed until then.
So we can clearly understand why China is hell bent on establishing it's own standards for video and the like. Being beholden to another entity for your basic computing is a bad thing.