“Together…we will deliver a custom experience for customers in China, providing local browsing and search experiences”, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President, Yusuf Mehdi, wrote in a blog post. Worldwide tech companies are finding it rather hard to stay competitive in the country, given stringent regulatory environment the Chinese government has imposed. Will CEO Satya Nadella eventually decide to lance the boil?
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The deals were announced as leading figures from Silicon Valley travelled to Microsoft’s campus to hear the Chinese premier speak.
This will enable Microsoft easier access to China’s large marketplace. One of the companies attached to this effort is CETC, a company that supplies communications and other technology to the military and for the commercial market.
The companies didn’t disclose financial terms. The USA company will also make sure that Chinese technicians get the proper training and support. A Chinese state agency past year said it was probing the way it distributes software. The latest deal by Microsoft is focused on attraction of customers to its Windows 10 platform.
There is no doubt the numbers have grown but that 10 million installs in China, from even a month ago, seem very small considering China accounts for almost 20% of the world’s population and subsequently has hundreds of millions of PCs which run Windows. More than half of Baidu’s revenue and traffic is stemming from mobile users, where Android and iOS are the operating systems of choice.
The new default search engine – and homepage – in Microsoft Edge will be Baidu, which Microsoft says has over 600 million active users. Those who prefer Bing or another search engine can change the default, though the company has attracted some criticism for making it harder to switch search engines in Windows than in the past. It is expected to win numbers in the country given Baidu’s presence in China (it is touted as China’s Google). “But there’s a lot to gain by pushing the Windows adoption”.
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In short, in spite of today’s agreement, it still will be Bing, not Baidu, that will power Windows 10 search and Cortana in China.
