John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

Huawei seem pretty committed to building their own OS and uncoupling from the Western technology stack in total

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...

The only reason Chinese companies can even get away with these big projects is because of state backing and state objectives. By itself, the market doesn't support a new general-purpose OS at this point.

> because of state backing and state objectives

MS is a state backed company. Very natural that China went the same path.

No it isn't

Technically you are correct but the commenter you’re responding to means that with the amount of Western Governments spend on MS products and services, the are a d facto (if not de jure) state backed enterprise.

US government spending is (for now) easy to track, and you can get totals for spending by corporate entity.

In total across the entire US federal government, $518.8 million was paid to Microsoft for products and services in 2024. That is approximately 0.21% of their total annual revenue.

I assert that the threshold for "state sponsored" is well in excess of 0.21% of annual revenue.

Federal Spending: https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/dd77b7c3-663e-cb91-229...

Microsoft Annual Revenue: https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/index.html

How much money have states and local governments spent on Microsoft products and services? How much money has Microsoft collected from companies that are providing products and services to US governmental agencies?

Government spending is not easy to track. This doesn't even begin to touch on non-monetary benefits Microsoft receives with government influence.