Windows Drops Bing in China for Baidu | Hacker News Reader

Windows Drops Bing in China for Baidu

blogs.windows.com

139 pointsmgalka65 comments

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.

> How much does state competitiveness play into China's firewall policies?

State competitiveness is baked into many of China's regulatory activities as a form of "soft power". Some China-watchers feel this makes the market less innovative, while others feel it encourages the creation of local versions of foreign products. Of course these typically include censorship and are jokingly referred to as "x with Chinese characteristics".

An example was when Apple was making a lot of boastful noise about crushing it in China, and very quickly got dinged on state TV: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/china-sing...

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.

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.

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

You should read more on decentralized computing, because it doesn't mean what you think it means.

Not the OP, but I think he means that search should be decentralized with respect to regional differences, not computing. Eg, Baidu is better positioned to give more relevant results in China

For a lot of search terms, Baidu is positioned way worse to give relevant results.

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.

The 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-c...

Serious 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.

> 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.

While at the same time openly adding backdoors and censorship for the US government.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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

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

MS made their search engine in 1999, only two years after Google.

The 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.

It'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

Also, the largest search provider in Japan is Yahoo! Japan (2nd largest is Google, which has been slowly gaining).

Coincidentally, Yahoo! Inc does not own Yahoo! Japan. They are only a minor shareholder. Softbank is the largest shareholder of Yahoo! Japan.

Yahoo! Japan is also extremely different from Yahoo! that we know. In Japan, it's a social network, auction house, storefront, message board, news service and search provider all rolled into one. And they started doing this years before anyone else (becoming a one stop shop). The site may look dated today, but it was years ahead of its time when it started doing all those things. It's one of the reasons why they've been so hard to unseat. They got in early, sprawled out and cemented their place in Japanese web culture.

Did you mean google.com or google.com.cn?

Both google.com and google.com.cn are blocked, along with all other country specific Google domains.

Thanks for the clarification. I was going by this wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...

So google.com, which does detract from my point.

It'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.

"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."

It would make total sense if Microsoft were no longer interested in competing with Google in the US.

Microsoft 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.

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.

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.

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

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

I 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.

The portals are _terrible_. There's two of them, one preview and one classic, both mandatory as not all features are in either. The new one is particularly slow. They're complicated and the preview UI feels designed for tablets -- long sequences that stay on the screen, sliding to the side like a metro app, called "journeys" make it a nightmare to navigate. Simple operations (create/destroy VMs) sometimes take many minutes. Sometimes, they hang for long times (50+ minutes killing a VM) - I suppose this is the platform more than the UI. Sometimes the UI just gets "broken" and you've got to refresh the page. (For instance, a save button won't activate even after changing fields, or saving won't actually make changes.) I know it feels like I might be flaming, but I cannot understate what an absolutely horrible experience using using the Azure portals has been (it used to better just with the single classic UI, but by no means excellent.)

Their SSD story is moronic - truly incomprehensibly silly. Normally, you'd expect SSD to be a checkbox on storage. "Hey, want this disk/blob/etc. to be SSD?" Not so on Azure. On Azure, you have to use a separate storage tier ("Premium Storage"), only available in 128/512/1024G slices. Want 256GB of SSD or more than 1TB? MS suggests software RAID - "Premium Storage" is incapable of handling this. Oh, your VM type also limits your IO. So if your IO far outweighs your RAM/CPU needs, well you get to pay for extra RAM/CPU in addition to the SSDs. And for a bizarre kicker, you can't even connect SSD volumes to regular VMs - only special types of special "tiers" of machines are allowed to connect SSD. Yep.

Let's talk about that. MS shipped these machines (D and G series) that have local SSD and went on about the perf of SSD. Except, each reboot, you lose that data (yes seriously). It's essentially useless outside of volatile caching (cute, but hardly that notable of a feature). And even then, only special "DS" series VMs were allowed persistent SSD. And just a week ago, they finally made "GS" series that allow SSD. What a pointless, confusing mess.

Networking. Hooboy! Azure was originally PaaS, and it shows. Each VM ends up in a "cloud service", which means a single TCP load balancer. They actually suggest that if you have multiple VMs (and you must, as there's 0% SLA for single-VM setups), that for things like SSH and RDP, you assign different ports to different machines (221 for vm1, 222 for vm2, etc.). If you want to LB your systems you're forced into a cloud service. (Sure, you can toss them on a VLAN and use SSH forwarding or a VPN, but you shouldn't be forced into such designs.) Azure networking blocks ICMP and only allows 150 ports open. To get around this, you need special public IPs, limit 5 per subscription.

Azure networking seems to suck. We experience packetloss with Azure unlike any other service I've used. We get packetloss or connection failure to SQL Azure several times a day. I actually PCAPd IIS serving pages and noticed TCP-related due to packetloss, something I've rarely seen on other providers. It's not even fast: Doing a backup of Elasticsearch to Azure blob took about 1/5th the time off our GCE nodes than Azure VMs (both provisioned as 4 or 8 core systems with SSDs - network IO was the limit).

Pricing. Ha! Azure is so ridiculously overpriced it's sorta strange. I compared identical setups on Azure and GCE. GCE came in at 1/2 to 1/5th of the price, depending on the exact VM characteristics. Azure does do discounts if you sign an "Enterprise Agreement" (yeah, no straightforward self-serve like AWS/GCE), but the discounts still didn't make it close to competitive. Even AWS (as far as I can tell; the whole reserved instance contract stuff seemed confusing) appears to be quite a bit less. Azure also doesn't seem to offer any sort of elastic pricing, like GCE's pre-emptible instances or AWS's spot instances.

If you're looking for an IaaS (thinking VMs, networking, a LB, and storage), Azure simply isn't a real competitor. Azure is focused on selling software. If you're gonna buy things like, I dunno, their hosted Elasticsearch product, or SQL Azure (which, apart from the connectivity issues, is a cool product), then hey, great. If you're buying into the whole MS ecosystem, connecting your AD systems to the cloud or whatever, Azure's probably the best option. (Even then, the management UIs .... ugh.) But for IaaS, no bloody way.

I've used AWS a bit. I am not very pleased with Google as a business (because of privacy stances and advertising), but I reluctantly tried GCE out and it's like night-and-day coming from Azure. Stuff is straightforward and simple. Machines are FAST (from clicking create to logging in via SSH in well under a minute; feels like a couple dozen seconds.) The portal is clean and easy to figure out. Networking is also easy, with no crazy "Cloud Service" BS dictating how I lay things out, and actually a ton more flexibility. (And even has a firewall thrown in!)

To anyone that thinks I'm exaggerating, I propose a simple comparison. Try to setup the following: A 3-node, SSD-backed Elasticsearch cluster and a pair of HTTP servers running a public site that privately connects to said ES machines. Then after that's done, modify the config to add another website (on a separate webserver than the first) that also needs ES access. Record total time to get this going, number of steps, ease of scripting, and do a perf comparison.

I used to be the biggest MS/Windows fanboy. I assumed Azure would rock just like Visual Studio does: Even Dave Cutler was involved with Azure, it's gotta be amazing, right? I've been heavily disabused of any such notions.

Azure 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.

Then somebody needs to tell Nadella that Cortana shipped with Windows 10, it is a major privacy leak and instead of fitting with "Office + Azure", it's alienating the very customers that are interested in "Office + Azure". Which would be quite ironic if Office+Azure would be representative of their strategy.

> 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.

On 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

-> 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

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.

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.

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/

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.

Who needs proof when repeating a story enough means people assume it is true?

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.

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

Why, it does. When you don't have a working product for a market, you don't pretend you do.

Are 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?

I 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.

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.

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

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?

> 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.

1.4 billion people, just have to nitpick on that.

God 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-cut...]

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

Bing goes the way of Ping?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com