
Windows Drops Bing in China for Baidu - mgalka
http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/09/23/windows-10-in-china/
======
mrdrozdov
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.

~~~
Sven7
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
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.

~~~
Sven7
:) Please tell me what has then in the last 10 years...

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waynecochran
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.

~~~
yeukhon
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
_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.

~~~
cwyers
Because 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
>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
Mozilla 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.

~~~
joesb
MS didn't make search engine, either. They decided to make one anyway.

~~~
yeukhon
I am not following. You said they didn't make one, but they made one anyway?
So they made one or not?

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

~~~
politician
There 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

------
vinceyuan
> _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.

~~~
fiveyearsinarow
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.

~~~
vinceyuan
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.

~~~
fiveyearsinarow
MS 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.

------
methou
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.

------
JohnTHaller
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.

~~~
paradite
-> _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
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.

~~~
paradite
This 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
Here'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/)

~~~
paradite
This article seems to be a legitimate source.

It terms the system that carried out the attack as _" the Great Cannon"_ and
then moves on to attribute _" the Great Cannon"_ to the Chinese government in
Section 4.

As _" compelling"_ as it sounds, the "attribution" in Section 4 seems rather
short and lacking technical details and proper references as compared to other
sections (Also I would not consider references from GreatFire as legitimate).
So I am not fully convinced about that section.

Anyway thanks for sharing this. I definitely picked up a lot from this
article.

------
eva1984
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
That would make sense if Microsoft didn't own Bing. But they do, so that makes
no sense at all.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Why, it does. When you don't have a working product for a market, you don't
pretend you do.

------
gsam
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.

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

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sandworm101
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?

~~~
mahranch
> 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
1.4 billion people, just have to nitpick on that.

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

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oksawe
Bing goes the way of Ping?

