Form my experience, mostly government and state-owned companies, which account for a big part of China's paid software market. Even some Shanghai government systems support only IE6 to 8, some only love IE11.
Most state-owned banks too, popular browsers are all duel-engine. There's little to no incentive to change what's working, and customers experiences don't really matter.
To consider it from a different perspective, perhaps customer experiences matter more in China. Technology in the US is super cool and cutting-edge but the constant shift to new technologies and the rapid deprecation of slightly old software leaves a significant body (perhaps even the majority?) of consumers in the dust.
Industrial equipment control computers mostly - the computer is part of the machine and cannot be upgraded. You see this quite a lot outside China too.
Honest question: Would using Linux have been a better idea then? An old unpatched Win XP has tons of vulnerabilities but so does an unpatched 20 year old Linux Kernel.
Using Windows XP on those devices often gets very bad rep but is there a viable alternative for machines that are air gapped and technically won't be upgradable for several decades?
"Attacks like Stuxnet, the computer worm deployed against an Iranian nuclear facility a decade ago, shattered the myth that air-gapped systems are impenetrable fortresses."
It wasn't really air-gapped if someone plugged an USB in it, was it ;)
I'm aware of the "over the air" methods to _read_ data from air-gapped systems (The blinking hard-drive light!), however I was referring to doing damage to industrial systems running legacy software, where you usually find this (think a big machine with a "terminal" attached to it that just controls the hardware and has no inputs).
At that time using XP was a very viable thing to do. You would pretty much never do it now. Think about it from a business perspective. Something goes wrong in the OS. At that time you would have had to have linux guru on staff to take care of it. OR you could pay 30 bucks for a OEM embedded copy. If something went kinda bonkers you could call microsoft and they would fix it. Their support on things like that is pretty good. At that time getting that sort of support for linux would have been basically nonexistant. Today you could get that kind of support for linux. Back in 2000-2004 it would have been tough. At this point no company is going to re-write the firmware on a machine they sold 20+ years ago unless they happen to be still selling that exact same model and you are paying for some awesome support contract.
Not if Linux won't run the programs you want to run or you don't have IT staff to get it to run with wine or something. Average users will just "take their chances" if they're behind a firewall and not surfing the web then chances are very low for getting a virus if you glue up the usb ports.
No, there are tons of regular office computers and even home computers that run XP. Industrial computers in China would actually be running fairly up to date OS's compared to, say, US.
I visited a number of factories in China last year and saw lots of XP on measurement, production and test equipment. All the office desktops were on W7 or W10. I'm sure lots of XP desktops exist, but I didn't see any in the (quite many) offices I passed through. I can't speak about home computers, I only saw a small handful.
Can't speak for Chinese systems, but I'm aware of "jump hosts" (used for remote access to industrial control systems) that are running windows server 2003 and are internet-exposed.
Right, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I have one of those XP machines still working.
Also, as I've mentioned ages ago, a few years back I visited a factory with a very expensive 5-axis industrial milling machine (I was told its value was about $300k). I was very surprised to see that it was still running Windows 2000—and that's something I'd definitely notice immediately, as W2K has always been my favorite Windows version.
When I asked the engineer in charge if they were going to upgrade Windows 2000 to a later version, he said without any hesitation whatsoever that they definitely would not. Moreover, without further prompting, he said that the machine had a design life of 25 years which meant that it would be in operation until at least 2025 if not longer.
He added that I wasn't the first to ask this question and went on to say that upgrading was irrelevant as W2K was still fully fit for purpose.
What is even more surprising is what I saw at a brand new industrial plant that I visited even more recently. This time the company was a large international operation with various plants across the world that is involved in the manufacture and assembly of heavy industrial equipment and parts. One of the reasons I was visiting the factory was that the plant was brand new, in fact tooling setups for some of its operations still had to be fully commissioned.
What I saw there were literally dozens of PCs still running Windows XP! The PCs were integral to the company's factory automation in that they controlled various industrial equipment and processes most of which were all brand new (after all, it was a new plant).
Here too, I quizzed the engineer in charge of showing me around about the use of the now very-dated XP on the company's PC. His reply was that by using XP in the operation of the new plant would ensure that this plant would still be identical with their other plants across the world and that this was strategically very important for many reasons, especially so at times of maintenance and breakdowns (as they could call on common practices and procedures already in use across all of their plants worldwide).
He added that whilst they still had considerable stocks of normal commercial PCs that were hardware compatible with XP, they nevertheless were aware of the potential that at some future point they might run out of 'normal' XP machines. To solve this potential XP/hardware obsolescence problem, they had an easy long-term solution, which is to use mobos that are normally used for industrial control processes (embedded systems, etc.) and there is no shortage of ones that are compatible with XP (in fact I've catalogs that have hundred of similar boards, so many in fact that it's a pain to differentiate or select the best board for one's application). Incidentally, many IT people have never seen these boards due to their niche nature. Even I think it strange that so many types of x86/64 PWAs exist as I can think of better or more appropriate processors for embedded systems, TI, Motorola and ARM chips for instance).
If anyone thinks old Windows technology is actually obsolete then let them think and think again. It's only naive or disinterested Windows users who are cajoled or coerced by Microsoft into upgrading Windows and those forced by default to do so when they buy new PC hardware who actually concern themselves Windows upgrades.
Of course it's only we IT professionals who are permanently preoccupied with OS upgrades and worry about such matters—not to mention the fact that we live in a perennial state upgrade-itis and always have security matters/patches permanently ingrained in our minds. The fact that we think this way lulls us into believing that most PC and smartphone users similarly think this way but in fact nothing is further from the truth. Moreover it's only a very small percentage of 'normal' PC users who ever bother to give their OS a second thought and that's only when it's a means to an end. Others including many industrial users are much more pragmatic and sanguine about upgrading and only do so when they absolutely must—and never at Microsoft's whim or wish.
Like it or not, expect to see ancient museum-piece versions of MS Windows still in use for decades to come.
Probably higher -- XP is still popular in China and supported by third party companies there.