Windows XP has been without official support for 18 months, but statistics portals still assign it ten percent of the global market. To find it, we must look East, and our first stop there is none other than China. Old systems and illegal copies form the perfect breeding ground for XP's persistence, although it has a new competitor there: Its name is NeoKylin, it has the backing of the local government, it is delivered preinstalled on new computers, and it has no problem imitating XP's functions.
Why Windows XP Still Persists
Replacing operating systems is not at all simple. Even within a shared ecosystem, the transition process can be chaotic and traumatic for users. Microsoft learned this the hard way on more than one occasion, as most radical changes in Windows caused virulent consumer rejection. Why does Windows XP still hold a tenth of the market? The answer is not very complicated: It works. A Pentium 4 with a reasonable clock speed and 2GB of RAM could receive Windows 7 without much trouble, but compatibility and performance are even better under XP on that class of hardware. The absence of official support can be managed with a bit of care, and the trick to receive updates from POSReady editions is well known.
China's Quest to Replace Foreign Technology
With these conditions, it is very difficult to convince users to abandon XP, and clear proof of this is found in China. Some sources give XP 25 percent of the local market, while others place that number much higher. However, there is a clear intention on the part of the Chinese government to replace foreign technologies, first for security reasons, and second to reduce costs. This brings us to the gates of NeoKylin, a sort of heir to the original Kylin that we mentioned in 2009. NeoKylin's interface is practically a clone of the XP interface, to such an extent that it even respects icon names and the structure of the main folders. Firefox takes on the role of browser, and the local office suite NeoShine does the same as a replacement for Office.
NeoKylin's Details and Dell's Adoption
The existence of the yum package manager profiles NeoKylin as a not-so-distant relative of Fedora, and although it is much more complicated than normal to add new software (for example, any attempt to install Chrome is rejected by the operating system), its presence is significant. Dell's Chinese division reports that NeoKylin is preinstalled on more than 40 percent of the computers sold by the company in China, although there are small differences between Dell's build and the one that can be downloaded from the Web. Of course... replacing NeoKylin with a Windows installation is not too complicated, to say the least.
