14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just announced that MSN China would be shut down next month, as it tries to switch focus to products that are actually more successful in the country.
The company hasn’t talked too much about the reasons for this closure, but it did confirm in a statement that MSN China would go dark early next month and Microsoft would remain fully committed to the local market.
“Microsoft will be shutting down the MSN portal in China on June 7. Microsoft is deeply committed to China, offering a range of products including Windows 10, cloud services to customers, and hosting the largest research and development center outside of the U.S,” the company said.
But the reasons for closing MSN China are strongly related to the increasing competition coming from local companies that are now offering similar solutions better tailored for Chinese Internet users.
Chinese companies offering alternatives to anything Microsoft
Microsoft first brought MSN in China in 2015 with the help of Shanghai Alliance, forming a joint venture whose purpose was to offer local Internet users access to services such as Bing, the MSN news services, Skype, and email. As more time passed by, however, local Internet companies spotted the growing interest in such services and decided to build their own, eventually offering solutions that are specifically optimized for users in the country.
Right now, WeChat, Baidu, and Weibo are the most popular services competing against Microsoft in China, and it appears that they have kind of won the battle already. Microsoft’s Chinese joint venture was also offering an instant messaging service called MSN Messenger (and then Windows Live Messenger), but the company pulled it globally to switch the focus on Skype.
It remains to be seen how Microsoft’s decision is received by Chinese users, but if there were still any users of MSN China, expect all of them to migrate to similar services offered by local companies.