Risky Dependence
These days, approximately 300 million PCs are sold worldwide a year and the annual supply volume in South Korea alone amounts to five million or so. According to market research firm Gartner, the global PC OS market reached 21 trillion won in size in 2014 and the Microsoft Windows accounted for about 96% of it. The ratio was more than 98% in South Korea.
Things are not that different in the smartphone and tablet PC OS markets. Net Applications recently announced that the Google Android OS and the Apple iOS represented 58.75% and 32.93% of the global mobile OS market in January this year, respectively.
Concerns over the ever-increasing reliance on the Microsoft Windows have already been raised for years. However, both South Korean enterprises and the South Korean government are suffering from the lack of an alternative to it. Some of them have claimed that its monopoly has resulted in disputes and damage associated with Microsoft’s lopsided license policy for profit maximization. They point out that the industry’s dependence on the Windows can lead to bigger problems in cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) environments in the near future and the necessity of alternatives to choose from is out of question in view of the fact that integrated operating systems will be developed one after another based on the PC and mobile operating systems to be incorporated into wearable devices, vehicles and many more.
Nowadays, Europe and China are increasing their efforts to reduce the dependence on the Windows. For example, Russia recently started the development of its own mobile OS based on Jolla’s open-source Sailfish OS and is planning to spread it to emerging markets in the long term. Russia has developed CPU chipsets with its own technology, too. China has worked on its own OS since 2014, when Microsoft stopped supporting the Windows XP. It is currently distributing the Ubuntu-based Kirin OS while developing mobile operating systems.
In South Korea, Samsung Electronics equipped its mobile devices and consumer electronics with the Tizen OS last year. Samsung Electronics is planning to turn the Tizen into a universal OS. LG Electronics recently unveiled smart TVs running on its Web OS 3.0, which is scheduled to be applied to a variety of home appliances.