Internet giant news

Some news about everyone's favorite internet giants:

• Yahoo! China to become a community based portal:

  "I’m changing Yahoo! China from a full portal of self-generated content to user-generated content," said Jack Ma, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, speaking at a conference in Singapore.

  We're not quite sure what this means -- we think it means more stuff like Yahoo! answers, but what we're worried about what there is going to be less of -- as far as internet search engines for Chinese language news goes, Yahoo is pretty decent.
• Is Microsoft going to pull out of China? Apparently, that's what a senior official at Microsoul said recently:

  Fred Tipson, senior policy counsel for the computer giant, said concerns over the repressive regime might force it to reconsider its business in China. "Things are getting bad... and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there,' he told a conference in Athens.

  Commenters on that post wonder if this is just a sympathy piece from Microsoft, or what the real motivations are, since no one seems to believe that Microsoft loses sleep about setting up shop in non-democratic countries.
• Last but not least, Google. They might establish a joint venture with Ganji.com, the Chinese company they share an internet content provider (ICP) license with. It seems that foreign internet companies like Microsoft and Yahoo all have to find a local company to share a ICP license with, which it seems that Google already has. What kind of benefits will creating a joint venture bring to Google that they don't have now? We're hoping a reader can enlighten us.

Photo from Time Magician's Flickr page.