14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft might have some serious legal problems in China, but the company is well positioned to tackle the local market with its products, including PCs, tablets, and smartphones.
Joe Belfiore, who’s now in charge of the Windows Phone business at Microsoft, revealed in a post on his Weibo account, a Chinese social networking, that a new team is being formed right now in order to create new Windows PCs, tablets, and Windows Phone for the Chinese market.
“The work we’ve done with our Bing team on Cortana is quite specific to China… and in fact, we are forming a Beijing-based team within my group to focus on China-specific work for PCs, Phones and Tablets. Lots of good stuff to come!” Belfiore said.
Microsoft’s executive also explained that the company will continue investments in the Windows Phone market in China, with new devices to be launched in the country in the coming months.
“We’ve felt it’s been important to get some basics in place (Dual SIM, TD-LTE, WRD program to make it easy for Chinese OEMs to build WP) before ramping China-specific investments—but you’ll see a bunch more of that soon,” he explained.
Of course, expect all these devices to be very affordable, especially because the company most likely wants to compete with cheap Android tablets and phones in the country.
Surprisingly, Microsoft is currently in trouble in China, as the local government is investigating the company for a possible anti-trust violation that might affect local firms.
Several Chinese government officials have raided Microsoft offices in several locations across the country and seized documents, computers, and internal conversations for an in-depth investigation that’s supposed to help determine whether the company is violating any laws or not.
Earlier this year, China decided to ban Windows 8 on government computers on claims of weak security, with some officials explaining that Microsoft might have implemented backdoors in the Windows source code to steal state secrets.
Microsoft was quick to deny such accusations, pointing out that it’ll continue to work with the government and offer them Windows 7 until all these issues are solved.
“We were surprised to learn about the reference to Windows 8 in this notice. Microsoft has been working proactively with the Central Government Procurement Center and other government agencies through the evaluation process to ensure that our products and services meet all government procurement requirements. We have been and will continue to provide Windows 7 to government customers. At the same time we are working on the Window 8 evaluation with relevant government agencies,” a company spokesperson told us.