
Baidu Goes All In on AI - ptrptr
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-16/the-mobile-internet-is-over-baidu-goes-all-in-on-ai
======
est
Background story:

Baidu totally missed China's mobile Internet market compared with Tencent or
Alibaba.

It's so called O2O (a term mostly used by Chinese) market share is burning
money.

Baidu's dreadful bet is today's AI hype.

~~~
yeukhon
Tencent's QQ (chat messenger) was the main reason for the success. QQ
attracted millions of young users. Within the chat messenger you could play
games and eventually blog/personal space, payment, and email were added. This
type of product development is extremely common practice in Chinese Internet
product. Portal experience and one-stop shop experience are critical UX one
must considered in China (and Japan too) to be successful.

Baidu made the mistake of advertising itself as a search engine like Google,
but failed to compete and catching up in 2000s when other competitors like
Tencent was already taking up millions of active users. Yes, Baidu music
exists, Baidu Bar (like Yahoo! Answers) also exists, but they are subpar.

Regarding to 360, basically back in 2000s, companies realized the best way to
sell their product was (1) partnership with computer seller by bundling
software just like McAcfee / Norton, and/or (2) provide toolbar so users can
access content from the browsers. Tencents and others developed their own
forked browsers. Then the era of virus/malware terror plague began as people
learned either the software have backdoor (they all do actually), software
doing weird things (e.g. system optimizer!), or people downloaded the software
from an untrusted source because of piracy and poor Internet safety education
(when people are pirating, they go to forums to look for software and if a
thread is hot users would click on it and get convinced to try the software -
little to their knowledge, most of them have backdoors).

360 was the most popular free anti-virus in China, and the company did a
massive marketing campaign and everyone fell for it.

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rodorgas
I would support an AI solution to make Baidu uninstall possible.

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200jin
Badidu's slogan:

Be the Evil, serve the Evil

~~~
johansch
I thought that was the slogan of Qihoo 360.

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startupdiscuss
Q to the community:

Should the wisdom of investing in ML depend on the probability of finding
problems in that domain that can be solved by: regression, classification,
clustering or prediction?

So, if Baidu has many problems that are likely (by whatever estimate) to be
solved by those techniques, then this is wise.

The solutions would have to be valuable to Baidu (presumably, though not
necessarily, by being valuable to the customers).

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alistproducer2
I think this reflects Baidu playing catch-up with Google more than the mobile
bet bring dead.

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jotjotzzz
Oh, that explains the random Skype hacks, got it. Hate this company already.

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auvi
from the article: "while Ctrip.com, the world’s second-largest online travel
agent". What is the largest then?

~~~
jumpCastle
priceline 86B$, ctrip 24B$

