Microsoft Sees a Window in Google’s China Woes

Andrew Browne
Wall St Journal
Thursday March 18, 2010

Chinese officials are masters of divide-and-rule, a tactic they’ve put to good use to enhance their bargaining position with the foreign business community.

So there was some eye-rolling among the more seasoned Western business executives in Beijing, earlier this year when Bill Gates weighed in on the Google vs. China imbroglio by criticizing Google and offering a sympathetic assessment of the Chinese position in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “Bill Gates Bats for China,” read a triumphal headline in the Global Times, a sometimes nationalistic Chinese newspaper.

The charitable explanation was that Gates was expressing a personal view.

Apparently not. It seems that this is now a part of the company’s image-making in China. In an interview published Thursday in the state-run China Daily, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie, chides Google for its impetuous behavior, and suggests that it should take a more mature approach to China. “I think we feel good enough now (about Microsoft in China). But it is a 20 year (journey) and not just three years (like for Google),” Mundie is quoted as saying. (The parentheses are China Daily’s).

Full article here

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