I wouldn't expect it to penetrate outside of China's Domestic market.
The idea that they would be able to competently create a English-Language OS is pretty laughable though. Even the highest-end Chinese International companies who aim directly at European and American Markets cannot seem to competently translate their product. (Though it's possible they offshore their translation to India, hah).
The article is overly "optimistic" and naive. For example:
Certainly China will emerge as a heavy weight challenger to the likes of Microsoft, Google and Apple.
We know very little about the Operating System "China" is supposedly creating (What will it look like? How will it act? Will it require it's own special software programs? Can it run Windows or Linux Software? Will it be Open Source? etc), and yet the article is quick to say that it is "certain"- that is, they are saying that there is absolutely no doubt that this new Operating System on which we know very little will be a "heavyweight challenger" to existing OS vendors.
That is pretty silly. While it is clearly going to be a "Challenger" on the domestic market because the CCP can basically ban anything else (it's already banned Windows Software from government systems), And it will no doubt strengthen the great firewall of China, I don't think there is even a chance of it gaining any traction outside of China for two reasons. The first reason is that They aren't going to be pushing it internationally. The entire point of the new OS is entirely for Domestic use- and it makes sense that a Government would kind of rather not be using software created by a company in another country for their core internal processes. The second reason is that few people outside of China are going to want to use a Chinese-made OS for the same reason the Chinese government wouldn't want to use a U.S-made OS. Outside China there isn't going to be any domestic pressure to use the OS and it's unlikely to be compatible with Windows or Linux- it certainly won't be running executables and programs from either, so for software you would end up relying on Chinese companies as well. (Unless, as I have a suspicion, this is just a fork or distribution of Linux being approved by the CCP in which case well that was much ado about nothing).
