China welcomes Microsoft and makes peace with English. Bill Gates' company has signed an agreement with the Chinese search engine Baidu to offer users results not only in Mandarin, but also in the most widespread language on the planet, written in Latin characters. The deal comes just over a year after the war with Google, which had decided to leave the land of the dragon in order not to submit to the regime's censorship.
At the time, the Californian IT giant had had to cede more than half of the market to its rival Baidu. Experts predict that the search engine Bing, signed by Microsoft, will be introduced by the end of the year, even if the version will have to comply with the country's strict censorship rules. About 470 million users use Baidu, about 83% of the entire market.
“It's a big deal to build your own search pages in English, so why not create an alliance with someone who already does the job right? – said Baidu spokesman, Kaiser Kuo, to the Los Angeles Times – it is a matter of satisfying the requests of our users in the best possible way”. According to Kuo, the partnership with Microsoft could make Baidu more competitive even on markets outside the Chinese borders: "We have learned a lot and this will help us to present ourselves abroad with new products".
To know more:
Los Angeles Times
