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Sino the Times: MSN to Pull Chinese Portal
from the losing-to-a-competitor-with-even-more-dirty-tricks dept.
El Reg reports [theregister.co.uk]
Microsoft's MSN China portal will farewell the Internet in June of this year, [signaling] a further withdrawal of the country's content presence in the Middle Kingdom.
The decision was first reported in Chinese media, according to Nikkei [nikkei.com], with Redmond to pay more attention to hosting, Windows 10, and its R&D operation.
The announcement was made on cn.msn.com, putting June 7 as the cutover for the portal to quit offering its news, lifestyle, and search services. It will redirect users to a Bing search bar (just in case users remember it) and a directory of Chinese sites.
As well as a refocus on products, Nikkei says local competition from Sina and Sohu, along with China's Great Firewall, were factors in the [decision].
Last year, Microsoft cut a deal with Chinese giant Baidu, which is now the default search engine in its Edge browser.
Baidu also became Redmond's Windows 10 distribution channel, offering a branded "Baidu Windows 10 Express".
Like so many of its American peers, Microsoft has also been the subject of unfavourable official scrutiny from the Chinese government. There was a monopoly probe [theregister.co.uk] launched in 2014, which intensified earlier this year when the government asked Redmond to explain alleged problems with the data it had provided.
