Windows Drops Bing in China for Baidu

http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/09/23/windows-10-in-china/

by mgalka • 11 years ago

139 65 11 years ago

blogs.windows.com

I am guessing that Baidu must have the proper censorship and control mechanisms built in. I bet there is a really interesting story underneath this.

yeukhon7• 11 years ago

I don't doubt for a second there was a closed-door deal with the state. But we also shouldn't dismiss the fact that Baidu is still the leading search engine in mainland China so for Microsoft it makes total sense to switch the default engine to Baidu. Windows 10 is actually pretty cool (speaking as someone who have abandoned Windows for several years). If the integration experience works out I actually think the switch is going to help (I am also looking forward to seeing what the AI team at Baidu are doing). The biggest challenge today is still making use of all the data, bring them to user in the most comfortable and usable way possible. Lots of fancy words, but I guess I can summarize that down to "shadow me, guess what I want before I ask, and do the things I want as I ask."

Surely censorship, privacy are big issues but I just want to voice my opinion on both ends.

jccc• 11 years ago

But we also shouldn't dismiss the fact that Baidu is still the leading search engine in mainland China so for Microsoft it makes total sense to switch the default engine to Baidu.

Well ... Google remains by far the leading search engine in the U.S.

Quite obviously they don't plan to switch the default from Bing to Google for us any time soon.

cma• 11 years ago

"But we also shouldn't dismiss the fact that Google is still the leading search engine in the US so for Microsoft it makes total sense to switch the default engine to Google."

mtgx2• 11 years ago

Microsoft would never do that willingly. would they offer Baidu as an option? Sure, but they wouldn't make it the default. That would be a silly "strategy". This was forced upon them. No doubt they get some "benefits" from this, too, though, but nothing that can outweigh Bing not being the default in China.

mtgx2• 11 years ago

The Chinese government wanted its backdoors and censorship, but the US companies didn't want to look like they would enable that in China while promoting privacy and security in the US.

So the Chinese government offered them a "compromise" - let our Chinese companies be the "front" for your products, in which we can include all the backdoors and censorship we want, while you get to tell everyone else how much you care about your users' privacy.

When anyone asks why the Chinese version of Windows 10 or Skype or Cisco routers or Cloudflare services come built-in with backdoors and censorship, just say "it's not us, you see, it's our Chinese partners doing all of that! We care deeply about our users' privacy and security."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/24/us-cisco-systems-c...

kuschku• 11 years ago

While at the same time openly adding backdoors and censorship for the US government.

mcintyre1994• 11 years ago

Serious question - are Apple doing this too? They talk what seems to be a serious anti spying thing in the US but then they talk up massive profits in China and availability on state owned China Mobile, I've been wondering how they're justifying that.

sandworm101• 11 years ago

MS is keeping software sales, but handing search, distribution, cloud, backup and mapping services to what is effectively a Chinese google? How exactly do they expect to make money from this?

yeukhon7• 11 years ago

God knows what kind of deal. But software sales will continue to be the biggest pie in their earning chart (if you remember they have a hard time selling MS products to Chinese government).

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/2985902/windows/microsoft-cut...]

mahranch2• 11 years ago

MS is keeping software sales, but handing search, distribution, cloud, backup and mapping services to what is effectively a Chinese google? How exactly do they expect to make money from this?

There's billions of people in China. It's a huge market. They'd rather play gimped rather than not play at all. Unfortunately for China, their governmental sanctioned monopolization of businesses is stifling their own innovation. It's the reason why, with so many people, practically nothing worth-while comes out of China as far as new inventions or technology goes. Whether it be software, industrial, manufacturing, health care, what have you, China is at the bottom of the pack. To acquire those things, they either have to buy, copy or steal them. And they do all three relentlessly.

Now if you're Chinese, you may think to yourself, "Good for them, then." And while it's good in the short-term, for most things, the "getting there" is potentially as valuable, or even more valuable than the end result. It allows you to improve upon things and make further innovations. It builds a foundation for further innovation. If you don't have that foundation, you're just leaving yourself further and further behind. We can see this happening right now.

I'm certainly no rabid pro-capitalist (I actually tend to lean towards socialism, specifically social democracies) but I won't deny the benefits of capitalism and its effects on a culture. It's actually why I'm pro-social democracy - I understand there are benefits to each political and economic system and think a social democracy takes the best of both worlds while minimizing (but not completely eliminating) the negative aspects.

Faint• 11 years ago

1.4 billion people, just have to nitpick on that.

lacker• 11 years ago

Looks like Nadella is moving away from Microsoft's products that don't fit in with an "Office + Azure" future. Bing, Windows Phone and XBox don't really fit their strategy any more.

TheSwordsman• 11 years ago

Maybe that means Azure will finally get some love. So many processes and technical decisions they made when building the platform are absolutely broken. The whole thing is half-baked in the worst of ways.

aroman• 11 years ago

I've never used Azure, but I've been considering it -- can you give some examples/links of half-baked-broken-ness?

bad_user2• 11 years ago

Then somebody needs to tell Nadella that Cortana shipped with Windows 10, it is a major privacy leak and instead of fitting with "Office + Azure", it's alienating the very customers that are interested in "Office + Azure". Which would be quite ironic if Office+Azure would be representative of their strategy.

oksawe• 11 years ago

Bing goes the way of Ping?

eva1984• 11 years ago

But the reason is nobody is seriously using Bing search in China. After they got the laptop, they will change it to Baidu themselves anyway.

Retra• 11 years ago

That would make sense if Microsoft didn't own Bing. But they do, so that makes no sense at all.

guard-of-terra• 11 years ago

Why, it does. When you don't have a working product for a market, you don't pretend you do.

98723• 11 years ago

Are you also against Microsoft's usage of Github and Linux since the own competitors to those? Should they stop making Office for iOS and android?

henryscala• 11 years ago

I use Bing to search technical and English contents. I think Bing is better than Baidu on this point. I think google is better than Bing, but I cannot use google naturally in China.

mrdrozdov3• 11 years ago

How much does state competitiveness play into China's firewall policies? If you think of China's people as a customer base, and China as a large corporation, then it wouldn't surprise me that they would take any steps within their power to prevent other "large corporations" from taking away their customers.

With that in mind, Baidu becoming the default search engine in a Microsoft product is a huge win for Baidu and China as a whole. It's also that many steps closer to being the default search engine for a Microsoft product in different countries, such as the United States.

Sven72• 11 years ago

I think this is just good for Search in general.

If for a moment one stops to think of Search and not of countries\companies, this is the way it should work.

Search needs to be much more decentralized than it currently is. People in different parts of the world think in different ways, express their information in different ways and access it in different ways.

For everyone on the planet to then have to wait for a few hundred people in some ivory tower in the West to decide how they access information is just not the most ideal way Search should run.

greglindahl• 11 years ago

What? Baidu is already the dominant search engine in China. This deal makes it slightly more dominant.

I'm all for search competition, but this isn't going to make it happen.

bad_user2• 11 years ago

You should read more on decentralized computing, because it doesn't mean what you think it means.

nikatwork2• 11 years ago

How much does state competitiveness play into China's firewall policies?

State competitiveness is baked into many of China's regulatory activities as a form of "soft power". Some China-watchers feel this makes the market less innovative, while others feel it encourages the creation of local versions of foreign products. Of course these typically include censorship and are jokingly referred to as "x with Chinese characteristics".

An example was when Apple was making a lot of boastful noise about crushing it in China, and very quickly got dinged on state TV: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/china-sing...

JohnTHaller2• 11 years ago

One concern would be if this provides a larger userbase to Baidu to be used by the Chinese government for attacks against folks like github again.

paradite3• 11 years ago

-> One concern would be if this provides a larger userbase to Baidu to be used by the Chinese government for attacks against folks like github again.

You are talking about 3 separate issues here:

a larger userbase to Baidu - most likely

Baidu being used by the Chinese government - maybe

Chinese government for attacks against folks like github again - some serious assumptions here, accusations != facts

JohnTHaller2• 11 years ago

You do realize that there was a well-documented case of the Chinese government setting the Great Firewall of China to send a altered Baidu javascript to users outside of China to engage in a massive DDoS of github in an attempt to pressure github into removing two projects that the Chinese government disapproves of earlier this year, right? It took github offline entirely and they didn't even have most of the attack deflected until 3.5 days in. Google the words github baidu ddos and you'll have your pick of legitimate sources. It's well known and well documented within the tech community. The mainstream media mostly ignored it.

gsam• 11 years ago

Maybe they just looked at the stats and thought this was a non-game? Furthermore, even with 'censorship', somehow I doubt many of the regular big names in search have algorithms that do all that well targeting Chinese.

vinceyuan2• 11 years ago

Baidu’s new Windows 10 distribution channel, Baidu “Windows 10 Express” will make it easy for Chinese Internet users to download an official Windows 10 experience.

What Microsoft really wants is to use Baidu's channel to distribute Windows 10. When Windows 10's market share is high, Microsoft will drop Baidu of course.

grrowl• 11 years ago

On the one band, Baidu's cloud service was serving malicious builds of XCode last week.

On the other hand, they were only being downloaded because within China Baidu is fast and anywhere else in the world is slow. At best, Win10 adoption in China can skyrocket if it can be installed easier. At worst, it's a modified version in Win10 riddled with backdoors.

fiveyearsinarow3• 11 years ago

I don't think Baidu has that much advantage in its distribution channel to make MS drop Bing. If MS wants a fast way to distribute, it can use torrent like Ubuntu does. It's much faster to download a torrent with Xunlei(Thunder) than with Baidu.

vinceyuan2• 11 years ago

It's not about the download speed. Many people in China use Baidu to find how to get and install (pirated) windows. If the official Windows 10 appears at the first one of the search results, Microsoft will be very happy.

natch• 11 years ago

Plausible deniability. "It's not us spying/blocking/hacking, it's Baidu."

bqlou• 11 years ago

This is a fast move since last Chinese PM 's visit in Seattle last week

methou• 11 years ago

So did Apple to Google. Actually I was forced to use Baidu with Siri, I have complained many times, email/phone/twitter, but nothing changed yet.

Windows Drops Bing in China for Baidu

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