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Comment by vinceyuan | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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