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Comment by peter303 | Hacker News Reader

Ironical MSFT and FB are fawning over Xi's visit giving him the royal tours. China treats these two companies very poorly. Nearly all MSFT software in China is pirated. China bans FB partly for censorship and partly to protect internal social networking products.

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MS technically has ability to shut off and cripple any pirated Windows over the wire if it wants to. But in this case, it has chosen not to for a lot of Asian countries. The reason? Market share.

It wants users to get used to how Windows works, versus to other alternatives like Linux, Mac, etc.

Freemium model.

Good observation. MS is willing to pay a high price for market share.

For example, nobody wanted Windows Mobile, so they paid Nokia to install it. Failing that (<4% mkt share), they bought Nokia.

X-Box is another product they're paying customers to take, in exchange for living room share. It's lost billions overall since its beginning.

Yes, so perhaps as a result, China will be more favorable to MSFT and FB.

MSFT and FB want to maintain and increase access to the 1.35 Billion people of China. Not ironic at all, those companies need to be in China even if treated poorly.

Except Google. But standing on principle is pricey.

Facebook is completely blocked in China, as far as I'm aware. In fact, it's not just blocked, a DNS lookup of facebook.com is returns a bogus IP address. I can't see why Facebook would think that they have any hope of getting unblocked, unless they are willing to let China's censors do their thing with Facebook posts.

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