I was rounding off, but in reality they might never reach 1.5 billion thanks to their falling birth rate.
In order for an OS to get adopted by Chinese users, it has to easily run the applications that Chinese users use. Period.
That is exactly what they are trying to make happen. The article says they are going to bundle versions of popular Chinese applications (think QQ, Weibo clients) with the distro.
This is why OS X doesn't work for China--it doesn't run enough Chinese applications. Canonical is apparently working with some Chinese government ministry to fix that issue ahead of time.
A potential issue, though, will be the thousands of Chinese websites that use ActiveX plugins and therefore cannot run on anything other than IE in Windows.
South Korea has the same problem of browser lock-in, only much worse because they actually passed a law saying that all online monetary transactions in the country have to use a specific ActiveX encryption plugin.
Microsoft already killed ActiveX (and Silverlight) but its legacy is that web developers all over East Asia have an enormous technical debt, and users remain locked in until they settle it.
In order for an OS to get adopted by Chinese users, it has to easily run the applications that Chinese users use. Period.
That is exactly what they are trying to make happen. The article says they are going to bundle versions of popular Chinese applications (think QQ, Weibo clients) with the distro.
This is why OS X doesn't work for China--it doesn't run enough Chinese applications. Canonical is apparently working with some Chinese government ministry to fix that issue ahead of time.
A potential issue, though, will be the thousands of Chinese websites that use ActiveX plugins and therefore cannot run on anything other than IE in Windows.
South Korea has the same problem of browser lock-in, only much worse because they actually passed a law saying that all online monetary transactions in the country have to use a specific ActiveX encryption plugin.
Microsoft already killed ActiveX (and Silverlight) but its legacy is that web developers all over East Asia have an enormous technical debt, and users remain locked in until they settle it.