Microsoft announces partnership with China’s largest search engine, Baidu

Microsoft said its Chinese cloud partner 21Vianet Group Inc.-which operates Microsoft’s cloud services in the country-is setting up a joint venture with an arm of state-backed chip-maker Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd. that will sell cloud services to Chinese state-owned enterprises.

Microsoft has announced its partnership with Chinese internet giant Baidu.

Microsoft says its aim behind the partnership is to offer Chinese customers an easier upgrade to its new software along with providing local, personalized browsing and searching experiences.

Microsoft really wants you to use Bing.

As Bit-Tech notes, Baidu is like the Google of China – so it does read very much like Microsoft giving up on search in the country. While it has no hopes of getting any profits from its Windows Mobile smartphones, as Android and iOS are the front-runners in the country, it undoubtedly has the ability to earn profits from its desktop operating system.

In China, more than 92% of web users choose Baidu as their search engine, The Journal noted, citing the China Internet Network Information Center.

This doesn’t mean that Baidu can deliver all of those active users to Microsoft’s distribution hub. There are already around 10 million users running Windows 10 in China, though hundreds of millions more are using previous versions, including pirated copies.

While at the Microsoft campus, the Chinese president met with senior company executives and board members, “watched technology demos and reviewed innovative new devices”, according to a Microsoft review of the meeting. Obviously, the software firmed looked at larger interest of the company and preferred to forego Bing as its default search engine, as well as, home page options in its Edge browser.

Microsoft told Search Engine Land that Cortana, the digital agent within Windows devices, will continue to be powered by Bing. The push hasn’t gotten in the way of Baidu’s resilient top-line gains, but it’s a different story on the bottom line.

Due to the emergence of China as a growing market for search/digital advertising, Baidu is now second only to Google when it comes to annual sales from global search advertising spending. The search engine is used by less than 2 percent of internet users in China.