Chinese Government Supports Initiative For Software
Industry
The Chinese government, as part of its initiative to
build up China's domestic software industry, has chosen
47 software companies to support in their efforts to win
contracts in the US and Europe. The effort is known as
the Offshore Software Engineering Project, and is designed
to help local companies win enterprise software projects
outside of China.
Traditionally, Chinese companies have been stronger in
hardware engineering and manufacture, while Indian companies
have been stronger in software engineering and enterprise
software projects. While China has large numbers of software
engineers, they do not have the experience needed to handle
large projects. Since the Chinese government has identified
software as a key industry in the country's development,
the Offshore Software Engineering Project is designed
to bring the more established software companies up to
international standards of business and development excellence.
Indian software companies, with their software development
experience, have been quick to tap into the Chinese
market. On the technology side, the only difference
they need to adjust for are localization, and coding for
Chinese, a double-byte language. On the business side,
early customers have been Chinese state-owned enterprises.
Leading US software companies, including Microsoft
and Oracle
all have significant development centers in China.
The Chinese government initiative is aimed at getting
control of key technology for Chinese companies so that
they have full access to all layers of the technology
development process. Then, the Chinese government will
push the new standards outside of China, first beginning
with the countries of Asia, and then out to other, further
removed markets.
Many American companies see this as a threat to their
technology and intellectual property, and have asked the
US government for support. So far, both sides have taken
hard positions and refused to budge.
In Asia, the Chinese, South Korean and Japanese governments
have partnered to develop a distribution of Linux which
supports double byte languages. Under the Linux license,
everyone has full access to the source code used to run
the operating system.
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