FORGET WINDOWS & MAC: FUTURE BELONGS TO HARMONY OS

Written by Michael Thervil

As the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention”, and since America weaponized their ability to sanction and apply tariffs on countries like China over the claims of “over capacity” and for the malicious purpose of intentionally rigging the silicon chip and AI market so that China would have to take a back seat to American interests. In doing so this has led to China's ability to become even more self-sufficient and self-reliant in the global chip and AI market and since then China's Huawei has emerged to the forefront. On the one hand you have the American Windows operating system which dominated the world for decades and on the other you have Apple's operating system with Google's android operating system filling the third slot for the three competitors in the global market in terms of operating systems.

All that is about to change with China's newest homegrown operating system called “鸿蒙(Hongmeng)” in Chinese and is simply called “Harmony OS” in the English language. Currently China is on the fast track to not only replace the Windows, Apple, and Android operating system for Huawei’s Harmony OS. At the moment Harmony which started out as a third-party operating system on Chinese smart televisions then Chinese cell phones have now grown to the point that that is on an estimated 900 million devices in China alone from its conception in 2019.

In order for Huawei and China's to reach its global ambition of having 2 billion users, Huawei in conjunction with the Chinese government has pre-installed Harmony OS on all of their tablets, television, smart phones, automobiles, and now personal computers and laptops. As it stands right now China as a country is growing to the point that they have no use of any American of the big three software firms. Currently, the sensationalism of owning an iPhone in the Chinese market is dwindling due to the interdiction and rise in popularity of Harmony OS. In fact, Huawei has now overtaken apple’s share of the Chinese market by 2% with Harmony OS being used by 19% pf the Chinese population to Apples 17%.

Remember necessity is the mother of invention and since China’s license to use Microsoft products have recently expired two months ago, that vacuum is expected to be filled by Huawei’s Harmony OS. Unlike Windows, which is a UNIX based system, Harmony OS is a Linux based system which means that unlike UNIX which is trademark and thus a closed system, LINUX is license free, open source, highly customizable and has a wider range of distribution and GUI’s (graphical user interface). If you're asking where the last time this actually made a difference was roughly two months ago when China's DeepSeek tanked the American artificial intelligence market causing a trillion dollars in losses. It was DeepSeek’s open ended (LINUX ) design that led it to topple chat GTP’s UNIX based closed system.

It seems that Adam smith’s articulation of the “Hidden Hand” of the Free Market goes beyond the discipline of economics and finance. Supply, demands, and the strategic use of an open-ended system which is the equivalent of the free market seems to always prevail.