Jane Lai
TENCENT CEO Ma Huateng apologized to users of Tencent products at a press conference in Beijing on Monday following the company s monthlong catfight with Qihoo 360 that sparked a public outcry.
Shenzhen-based Tencent, China s largest Internet firm by market capitalization, and Qihoo 360, China s top provider of free security software, have been involved in a tit-for-tat spat for more than a month, accusing each other of indecent business practices such as spying, hacking and leaking users private details.
What Qihoo 360 had done was a rare large-scale bold kidnapping of Internet users in the global Internet circles, Ma said.
Tencent should take responsibility for the inconvenience it had caused to users, Ma said.
When asked whether Tencent would impose a two-for-one choice in the future, Ma said a company would not choose such a way for no reason because it had a deadly impact on the company.
Because a certain number of people accused Tencent of being a monopoly, the CEO did not consider market capitalization as everything. The key is to see whether it has abused its market capitalization and power in normal competition.
Ma said his public relations team had failed to do a good job and the team lacked preparation for an emergency while Qihoo 360 appeared to have been well prepared for the dispute.
Because some users had accused the company of plagiarism, Ma said Tencent had launched a series of innovations, but it usually kept a low profile.
While several Internet industry leaders including Baidu and Kingsoft had vowed to end cooperation with Qihoo 360, Alibaba, China s largest e-commerce firm, was said to have also called an end to advertising with Qihoo 360, which, according to insiders, would cause Qihoo a 40-percent profit loss.
Wang Shuai, vice CEO of Alibaba, refused to comment, while a spokesperson for Qihoo said the company didn t care (if Alibaba canceled advertising partnership), media reports said.
Two dogs fight over a bone, a third runs away with it.
Rumors said that Microsoft MSN, the most popular international instant messenger, would profit by the two giants battle after it offered users a new function to import their QQ friends, but the function had been blocked by QQ.
However, it had not been officially confirmed by Microsoft and a number of netizens considered it another trick by Qihoo to win the battle.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Public Security were acting as arbitrators to settle the issue between the two companies. It seemed they had a lot more to do to end unhealthy competition in business, a China Daily report said.
On Nov. 3, Tencent said it was shutting down QQ on computers installed with antivirus software run by Qihoo 360, claiming that a new tag-on service run by 360 Safe had affected the normal functioning of QQ. With 360 Safe installed, we cannot guarantee the safety of our service.
In response, Qihoo 360 CEO Zhou Hongwei said: Although we had good intentions, we did not expect it to infuriate Tencent, which then vented its anger on Internet users.
Immediately, a number of netizens said on QQ and blogs that the two were holding a large number of users hostages more than 600 million for Tencent and over 300 million for Qihoo 360 and using them as bargaining chips.
