10 ms·
Windows Drops Bing in China for Baidu
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- waynecochran 11y agoI am guessing that Baidu must have the proper censorship and control mechanisms built in. I bet there is a really interesting story underneath this.
- yeukhon 11y agoI 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 11y agoBut 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.
- yeukhon 11y agoThe article is about China, so the same business (and political) strategy does not apply in the U.S. Simply put, maybe oversimplified, but with the political support and native integration: * both Google and Bing are born in the U.S. * Google and Bing cannot compete with Baidu in China * Google and Bing cannot compete with Yandex in Russia I wouldn't be surprise to see Yandex becoming the default in the future.
- mrdrozdov 11y agoIt's probably worth noting: * Google is blocked in China * Google and Bing are not blocked in Russia While we're at it * Facebook is blocked in China * Facebook is not blocked in Russia * VK (Facebook alternative) is more than twice as popular as Facebook in Russia
- yeukhon 11y agoDid you mean google.com or google.com.cn?
- mrdrozdov 11y agoThanks for the clarification. I was going by this wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C... So google.com, which does detract from my point.
- yeukhon 11y agoIt's okay. I think your points are still very beneficial to have. IMO native companies always have advantage as they usually have better understanding about the culture, user preference, and government. Portal is a big thing in the Eastern Asian countries like China and Japan so for a long time Yahoo and MSN search used to be leading the game until, of course, more Internet search engines come online.
- fiveyearsinarow 11y ago
- cwyers 11y agoBecause Google won't pay Microsoft for it, won't partner with Microsoft, etc. Baidu is not a total competitor to Microsoft the way Google is.
- bobajeff 11y ago>Because Google won't pay Microsoft for it, won't partner with Microsoft, etc. Where do you get that impression? They pay Mozilla, Apple, and several other companies royalties for referrals to their search engine.
- yeukhon 11y agoMozilla and Apple don't make Internet search engine (although some speculates Apple is making a rivalry search engine). They integrate with the Internet search engines out there.
- cma 11y 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."
- 9872 11y agoIt would make total sense if Microsoft were no longer interested in competing with Google in the US.
- mtgx 11y agoMicrosoft 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.
- mtgx 11y agoThe 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-china-idUSKCN0RO0AE20150924 http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/24/us-cisco-systems-c...
- kuschku 11y agoWhile at the same time openly adding backdoors and censorship for the US government.
- mcintyre1994 11y agoSerious 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.
- nikatwork 11y ago> are Apple doing this too? Surprisingly, they didn't seem to be last time I checked (2013). There were many apps available in the CN app store which you'd think the govt would remove, especially around comms and reading material. If it hits the govt radar they will definitely act, which could have massive technology and public perception implications for Apple.
- sandworm101 11y agoMS 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?
- yeukhon 11y agoGod 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-cuts-deals-in-china-with-government-organizations-and-companies.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2985902/windows/microsoft-cut...]
- mahranch 11y 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.
- lacker 11y agoLooks 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 11y agoMaybe 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 11y agoI've never used Azure, but I've been considering it -- can you give some examples/links of half-baked-broken-ness?
- fphhotchips 11y agoI can. The Azure Data Factory is broken in design, UX, documentation and functionality. In a couple hours of evaluation, I wrote up two pages of issues.
- tacos 11y agoAzure is AWESOME. The core pieces -- compute, storage, queues, and especially database -- are rock solid and often far more powerful than the AWS equivalents. Dig in and you'll start to see big holes in AWS. I still use AWS for some things. But I'd also avoid the newer, weirder stuff both places. Amazon API Gateway? Amazon Lambda? Azure Data Factory? Azure Active Directory B2C? Yeah, expect pain.
- politician 11y agoThere are two management portals -- classic and "preview". You would think that "preview" supersedes classic, but you'd be wrong -- you actually need to be comfortable using both (and the CLI tools) to get stuff done. There's actually a Linux/OSX version of the Azure CLI tools, but it lags behind the Windows Powershell tooling and classic and "preview" which is pretty frustrating. Then, there's the ASM environment and the new-hotness ARM environment. So, the web portals support some mishmash of ARM features, but still offer classic features. The Linux/CLI tools support some of the ARM features, but not all of them either. If you're working from OSX, it's best to just stick with the ASM environment; otherwise, you're in for pain. Either way, you'll need to keep using both management portals. The current score: 1. Classic Portal - deprecated, but not really; also incomplete 2. Preview Portal - official, but still beta, but has exclusive support for some features (ARM, Redis) 3. Linux/OSX xplat-cli - incomplete and clumsy 4. PowerShell - Windows-only, **maybe** a superset of the other tools
- oksawe 11y agoBing goes the way of Ping?
- eva1984 11y agoBut 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 11y agoThat would make sense if Microsoft didn't own Bing. But they do, so that makes no sense at all.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoWhy, it does. When you don't have a working product for a market, you don't pretend you do.
- 9872 11y agoAre 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 11y agoI 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.
- mrdrozdov 11y agoHow 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.
- Sven7 11y agoI 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 11y agoWhat? 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.
- Sven7 11y ago:) Please tell me what has then in the last 10 years...
- bad_user 11y agoYou should read more on decentralized computing, because it doesn't mean what you think it means.
- 11y ago
- JohnTHaller 11y agoOne 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.
- paradite 11y 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
- JohnTHaller 11y agoYou 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.
- paradite 11y agoThis comment shows ignorance at its best. Show me one source that has proof that (1)Chinese government was behind the attack, (2) Baidu was behind the attack.
- wolfwyrd 11y agoHere's the paper[1] from the University of Toronto showing that the attack originated from the Great Firewall. Given the firewall is operated by the Ministry of Public Security that points the finger pretty clearly at the government. The way the attack was orchestrated implies however that Baidu was an unwitting victim. [1]https://citizenlab.org/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/ https://citizenlab.org/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/
- gsam 11y agoMaybe 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.
- vinceyuan 11y 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 11y agoOn 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.
- fiveyearsinarow 11y agoI 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.
- vinceyuan 11y agoIt'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.
- fiveyearsinarow 11y agoMS can 1) push win10 though windows updates(much like iOS) or 2) buy search keyword ads on Baidu. I fail to see how dropping Bing is a better choice, unless MS is getting paid a lot or forced upon by the gov.
- natch 11y agoPlausible deniability. "It's not us spying/blocking/hacking, it's Baidu."
- bqlou 11y agoThis is a fast move since last Chinese PM 's visit in Seattle last week
- methou 11y agoSo 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.