Baidu Goes All In on AI

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.

I thought that was the slogan of Qihoo 360.

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