TFA suggests that this means the financial hit of off-shoring manufacturing is actually small. Whether or not the article is correct on money making its way back to the US, there is an important factor. The money is making its way right back into the pockets of the company owners and rights holders. The people who would normally make their living in these manufacturing jobs are still stuffed. I don't think that any "trickle down" effect from returned profits is going to make up for that.
I'll add my voice to this. Give me applications that are focused and good at what they do, don't create some hideous hybrid that merely does everything badly. Besides, GIMP is really the wrong tool for creating books. You should be exporting graphics from whatever program you use and then importing them in a proper desktop publishing program. If you want Libre software, you can look at Scribus for these purposes. (That has some notable omissions such as decent table layout, but it might be sufficient for your needs). You don't want to be making a book in GIMP! (Or Inkscape). Use the right tools for the right job.
Bing was the worst search engine mankind has ever seen please do the world a favor, hire a real profesional commercial writer, and do yourself a favor, save millions while your at it, take it off line, Don't embarasse your self more than you already are, work on somthing that will actually make users happy to buy your software, instead of wishing to have a root canal rather than having to upgrade their software As I've heard that Vista was one of the worst mistakes the company has ever produced.
Maybe take a lesson from apple who actually did somthing right for once, or get some new ideas from the public, instead of sticking to the same old things, People will actually like it maybe,someday,All vista users either deserve money for personal damages, a replacement for an apple, free upgrades, or some apology for the utter disasters, so far you have made.
How many people will agree that Bing was a bit of a joke, "decision engine" I mean come on is that the best you could really do? Ask yourself how many microsoft employees use an apple and their software, rather than your own? How could we change this.
How can you live knowing that people dread to have to constantly upgrade their microsoft software, and get attacked on a daily basis. rather than apple users who don't have to get pounded by a tidal wave of attacks.
Please do everyone a favor and please create better software. Every person I know dreads pc's and prefers apple's computers.
Please please, destroy bing, and vista, do your "loyal customers" who have no choice but to constantly upgrade by new versions, and pay loads of cash to software they are forced to use. Windows 7 was an improvement but still could use some serious work, Use all the man power your company has and resources to make a program better than what is on the market. Don't get me started on all the files which your hardware has.
You are probably asking but we do take your input- I almost forgot about that obviously there must be a break up on your end, or its more of bunch of bogus, it obviously never helps and it never reaches you. you can obviously answer your own questions. Maybe you will discover why apple is a hot ticket item.
Best reguards,
unknown annoyed and frusturated user
So what search terms are you using that give markedly better results in Google or Yahoo, than in Bing?
Similar. I'll probably keep Opera, but I certainly wont be promoting it to others the way I have been anymore. Shame on them. Maybe I will use something else (going back to Konqueror in my case).
The thing is that the anti-Microsoft people sometimes get carried away and accuse MS of all sorts of evil that they haven't necessarily committed, so others sometimes correct them. Nobody does this with Murdoch's media empire because there isn't any sort of evil they haven't committed.;)
That would be hilarious. The traffic to Murdoch's sites would fall, he'd have to threaten Google with some sort of discrimination charge to get his own sites back up. And from then on, any attempt he made to force Google to index his sites would be laughed to death. Nice one.
It may be different in other countries but in the USA and the UK, the act of linking itself is not a problem. There might be cases where it is, e.g. if you say "the following people are peadophiles" and then link to a list of home sites, but these are all as relevant to the legality of linking itself as the illegality of murdering someone with a hammer is to the legality of hammers.
Now if you're doing other things, such as caching the sites content and perhaps displaying it in a different format, then things become more confused. Google displaying the first few lines of a search result? Fair use in the USA. The UK doesn't have "fair use" as such, but I doubt a case would get very far and, more to the point, no-one would bother bringing such a case. The thing is, it's pretty easy to add a robots.txt file to your site and Google respects these. Laws would only have to made to deal with this area of technology if it were onerous or in dispute - e.g. a site owner has to keep track of hundreds of different "don'tcrawlmebro" files, or they're horribly complicated, or Google or Bing or whoever refuses to respect them or caches more than site owners feel is fair.
At present, things are working nicely so there hasn't been much impetus to create laws dealing with this area. Murdoch would be happy to bury this area in laws, of course. His interest is against an open commons and in favour of a model that involves lawyers and money. He has lots of both, you see. The threat to him is not his business rivals stealing his customers, but his customers no longer needing him.
No. Microsoft are historically evil, but haven't actually been too bad lately. Murdoch's empire has not only been a hundredfold more damaging to us all than MS ever has, but is ramping up to be even worse for us all than it has been yet. In the UK, they're cutting deals with the Conservatives to give them the support of the major newspapers they own, they're poisoning the very notion of investigative journalism and they rarely pay taxes worth a damn. And now they're trying to gain control of what we find on the web. No Microsoft - stay mildly evil!
The point is that Microsoft have a credible case here that they aren't censoring the results. As has been shown elsewhere you certainly can get results for Tienanmen Square that include "Tank Man" from Bing when using simplified Chinese (I think that and Falun Gong are the only examples of censorship most Slashdotters actually know). These actually even include results that Google has deliberately censored (you don't get Tank Man with the same search in Simplified Chinese). Given that the vastly overwhelming proportion of sites in Simplified Chinese are in mainland China, it would be odd if China's censorship didn't skew the results. Even a lot of ex-pat sites outside of China probably use English.
Microsoft might be censoring the search results with Bing but TFA is a loaded and biased piece that makes nauseating excuses for Google's own censorship whilst their case against MS amounts to "I thought I had some evidence, but it turns out there's another explanation but they could be censoring things even though I admit they're probably not. Still, people will only read my inflammatory headline and that's the main thing".
And no, just because you declare in bold that we are limiting discussion to Chinese ex-pats in the USA, doesn't mean we're going to. My topic was here first.;)
My code wasn't involved in the LSE crash, actually. My code is in some of the lower-level networking systems, thanks for asking.;)
I like the way rather than point out any weakness in my argument you shot off to investigate me and see if there were any nice ad hominems you could use. I like the way that you consider my fifteen years experience in software engineering some sort of insult. I particularly like the way you carefully snip my old bio to make it sound like crass boasting when it was actually a joke: the full version ends with "so why do I spend half my time explaining to people how to insert pictures into Word documents?" I like all these things you've done because they amuse me. All they show is an attempt to construct poor ad hominems which makes you look like you can't argue.
As to the two lines of your post which contain an argument:
Do you think you could beat MS at software production ? Why do you think the other poster thinks that ? Conflating an organisations abilities with an individuals is playground shite. I think Cadillac make crappy cars, do I need to make better cars in order to have an opinion on the subject ?
The OP called MS "a bunch of clowns". He began the comparisons at the individual level. I have found that generally, the people who work at the level of writing OS's or large application suites such as MS Office, have too much of an appreciation of the work involved and the difficulty of it to casually put down others that do the same. I've often seen Linux fanboys here on Slashdot slagging off Windows. I don't recall seeing any Linux Kernel developers engaging in the same sort of petty bashing. They know what's involved and they've all made coding mistakes that can kill a system dead (sometimes released, sometimes caught in time). I've done enough larger scale work to know how epic a task like Windows 7 or Excel is. And that is why I asked the OP if he could do better - not because there's any chance a lone individual could, but because his casual laughing and insulting of other developers strongly suggests to me he's never worked at that level. If he came back and said, "actually, I've committed a number of fixes in the Linux kernel," or "I'm one of the Open Office devs" then that would be something. But like I say, these people have gone through the process and tend to not make massive blanket insulting statements like the OP.
No, you don't need to make a better car than Cadillac in order to have an opinion on whether their cars are good or bad. But if you were a car designer, you'd probably be a lot more thoughtful about it. And even if you're not experienced in this matter, you still ought to be able to say "Cadillac cars are crappy because manufacturer X does Y better". I'm typing this in Opera on a KDE desktop. My primary OS is Gentoo. I like GNU/Linux because it has all the tools that I need to work with free, it's more secure than Windows and I can tweak it to do everything I want. But I don't think Microsoft is a bunch of clowns that can't innovate and if someone wants to say they are, they should back it up. I don't think that's too much to ask.
Logically, accepting "someone else may do it if I don't" as a justification for your own immoral behavior guarantees a state of immoral behaviour existing. The only possibility of achieving a state without the immoral behavior is to not engage in it oneself. Yes, you are exchanging a certainty of their being immorality for a possibility that there might not be, but some of us consider that progress. And you might be surprised what an example can achieve sometimes.
Since most of the results they will get with Bing are... wait for it... censored garbage
Okay, you're posting all over the place with this stuff. What evidence do you have that Bing is censoring results? Google admits that they censor results. Microsoft say that they do not. So back up what you're saying with something, please. TFA hasn't held up. It makes sense that if the vast majority of online presence in a particular language is in mainland China where online censorship is the rule, that the results of searches for, e.g. Tianamen Square, come up with Tourist Information rather than articles about the protests. But even so, it's not the case that this universally happens. Compare the two image searches posted lower down in this thread, done in Google and Bing. The Google one omits pictures of protests and "tank man". Bing actually has them.
So kindly back up your statements with some evidence, because I'm not seeing it. I'd like some searches in simplified Chinese to back this up, please.
Really? It's rather curious then that when I search in English sites from England aren't at the top of the list. Assuming everyone who speaks Chinese is from China is not even ludicrous... it is just the spin of the day/fiasco. What do they do when you search in French? Do they prefer Canada or France? Think man! Think!
What is this rubbish? You find it "curious that when you search in English, sites from England aren't the top of the list"? English is spoken far more widely than just in Englang, including a certain country called the USA you might have heard of. You'd be surprised if you searched in English and got lots of results in German, though. In contrast "simplified Chinese" is used by mainland China (you can't even include Hong Kong as they don't use it much), the UN and the impressive but nontheless tiny "country" of Singapore. So why do you go all conspiracy theory when the primary search results for a search in simplified Chinese are overwhelmingly sites from mainland China?
Saying that I "assume everyone who speaks Chinese is from China" is showing a complete ignorance of what we're actually discussing.
OP: Microsoft are a bunch of clowns who can't create decent products.
Me: Lets see you produce something better than Windows 7 or Excel, or even remotely close to that.
You: Three decades ago, Microsoft bought an OS.
I fail to see the logical sequence here. If you're just trying to find ways to put the credit for any good points of MS products onto others, rather than give it to them, then you could at least show some more up to date knowledge and refer to Windows NT which built its networking capabilities on top of FreeBSD (and was later the platform for Windows 2000) and for which I don't think they paid a cent, unlike MS-DOS. But the fact remains that MS have put out some very good software and likely put the OP who's calling them "clowns" to shame. And now that they actually have credible threats to them (Yay! Linux!), they're really getting their act together. Note that I don't give a "Yay! Apple" even though they are also a motivator to MS to improve their products. The reason is that I see Apple as merely Saruman to MS's Mordor. They don't want to overthrow MS, they want to be MS. The various Linux distros are the Fellowship of the Ring in this analogy. Gandalf = Slackware. Aragorn = Red Hat. SuSE has to be Boromir (will betray the rest). Legolas has got to be Ubuntu - has all the style and the looks, bit poncy. Debian would probably be Elrond - totally important and the basis for everyone else's progress, but not going to get the glory. Gimli is surely Gentoo - really impressive if you look at the facts, but ugly and frequently overlooked.
I've gone off on a tangent, haven't I?
Yes, that is correct. Anyone searching Bing in China using English or Russian (in your example) would get the same search results as you or I searching in English or Russian. That's not a loophole, Bing isn't actually censoring anything apparently. It merely returns results preferentially in the same language you search in. And simplified Chinese is pretty much a mainland China thing where, unsurprisingly, there aren't a lot of websites talking about protests or being positive about Falun Gong. The author of TFA comes across as having quite an agenda, imo.
Note: I also think that the MS Bing commercials are about the dumbest I've seen
Smart people will choose products based on their needs and their research on the matter. Commercials are for the people who associate brands with lifestyles (i.e. silly people). Don't be surprised if you find their commercials dumb, be uh, depressed that there exists a target audience for those commercials. Hmmmm. I need to re-think this.:(
Actually, this gets more interesting having looked into this more closely. It's just about possible that Microsoft is being less evil than Google in this case. Whilst Google admits to deliberate censorship both on its google.cn site and (to a much lesser extent but still to some extent) on its google.com site (they eliminate some Falun Gong results from their image search - they admit this), Microsoft are pleading a different case. Basically, Microsoft have stated that the way their search engine works is to return results with a preference toward sites in the language searched in. Naturally when you search in simplified Chinese characters, which are overwhelmingly used in mainland China as opposed to places like Hong Kong and Taiwan which use the complex form, most of the results in that language are going to be from mainland China. And mainland Chinese websites are, well, not going to be essays about Tiannamen Square or have many pro-Falun Gong material.
I condemn censorship, but Microsoft's explanation is eminently plausible. In fact, if you thought about it, it's a natural consequence of returning search results in a particular language if that language is more or less exclusive to a particular nation that censors.
Google also censor search results in China. And conceivably more effectively if you can't get access to Google sites outside of China. (Typically, Google find a more savvy way of pulling off the technical feat of search-censorship than Microsoft). Yahoo has been the worst of the big three based on what information is available to us - they actually handed over the confidential information of a pro-democracy campaigner over there.
well if their goal was to differentiate from google, i guess "don't be evil" is a good place to stand apart.
Google also censor results in China. Search for Tiannamen Square or Falun Gong on google.cn and you find just the same whitewashed results as with Bing. The difference is merely one of implementation. Google has done it by censoring the results in their country-specific site. Bing have done it by censoring results when you search using a language form popular in mainland China. It's hard to say conclusively which is least effective. With Google you can search via one of their international sites to get around it. With Bing you can enter search terms in a different language such as English. Both are, of course, subject to the Great Firewall of China interfering when you follow results to places like Wikipedia etc. which is not the fault of either Google or Bing.
So in summary, Google innovates and Microsoft copies. Not much change there, but unfortunately they have both sold out to the Chinese government. Neither is clean.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA suggests that this means the financial hit of off-shoring manufacturing is actually small. Whether or not the article is correct on money making its way back to the US, there is an important factor. The money is making its way right back into the pockets of the company owners and rights holders. The people who would normally make their living in these manufacturing jobs are still stuffed. I don't think that any "trickle down" effect from returned profits is going to make up for that.
I'll add my voice to this. Give me applications that are focused and good at what they do, don't create some hideous hybrid that merely does everything badly. Besides, GIMP is really the wrong tool for creating books. You should be exporting graphics from whatever program you use and then importing them in a proper desktop publishing program. If you want Libre software, you can look at Scribus for these purposes. (That has some notable omissions such as decent table layout, but it might be sufficient for your needs). You don't want to be making a book in GIMP! (Or Inkscape). Use the right tools for the right job.
Those of us that can use sed to strip out the tags are highly unlikely to be using Word to create HTML documents! We do it in vi and we like it.
So what search terms are you using that give markedly better results in Google or Yahoo, than in Bing?
Similar. I'll probably keep Opera, but I certainly wont be promoting it to others the way I have been anymore. Shame on them. Maybe I will use something else (going back to Konqueror in my case).
The thing is that the anti-Microsoft people sometimes get carried away and accuse MS of all sorts of evil that they haven't necessarily committed, so others sometimes correct them. Nobody does this with Murdoch's media empire because there isn't any sort of evil they haven't committed.
Mistake on my part: I meant to say "any attempt he made to force Google to pay to index his sites would be laughed to death". Which it would be. ;)
That would be hilarious. The traffic to Murdoch's sites would fall, he'd have to threaten Google with some sort of discrimination charge to get his own sites back up. And from then on, any attempt he made to force Google to index his sites would be laughed to death. Nice one.
It may be different in other countries but in the USA and the UK, the act of linking itself is not a problem. There might be cases where it is, e.g. if you say "the following people are peadophiles" and then link to a list of home sites, but these are all as relevant to the legality of linking itself as the illegality of murdering someone with a hammer is to the legality of hammers.
Now if you're doing other things, such as caching the sites content and perhaps displaying it in a different format, then things become more confused. Google displaying the first few lines of a search result? Fair use in the USA. The UK doesn't have "fair use" as such, but I doubt a case would get very far and, more to the point, no-one would bother bringing such a case. The thing is, it's pretty easy to add a robots.txt file to your site and Google respects these. Laws would only have to made to deal with this area of technology if it were onerous or in dispute - e.g. a site owner has to keep track of hundreds of different "don'tcrawlmebro" files, or they're horribly complicated, or Google or Bing or whoever refuses to respect them or caches more than site owners feel is fair.
At present, things are working nicely so there hasn't been much impetus to create laws dealing with this area. Murdoch would be happy to bury this area in laws, of course. His interest is against an open commons and in favour of a model that involves lawyers and money. He has lots of both, you see. The threat to him is not his business rivals stealing his customers, but his customers no longer needing him.
No. Microsoft are historically evil, but haven't actually been too bad lately. Murdoch's empire has not only been a hundredfold more damaging to us all than MS ever has, but is ramping up to be even worse for us all than it has been yet. In the UK, they're cutting deals with the Conservatives to give them the support of the major newspapers they own, they're poisoning the very notion of investigative journalism and they rarely pay taxes worth a damn. And now they're trying to gain control of what we find on the web. No Microsoft - stay mildly evil!
Hmmm, well, it's been a couple of hours and he's not replied... I'd say "not long".
Okay - that made me laugh! :D
;)
The point is that Microsoft have a credible case here that they aren't censoring the results. As has been shown elsewhere you certainly can get results for Tienanmen Square that include "Tank Man" from Bing when using simplified Chinese (I think that and Falun Gong are the only examples of censorship most Slashdotters actually know). These actually even include results that Google has deliberately censored (you don't get Tank Man with the same search in Simplified Chinese). Given that the vastly overwhelming proportion of sites in Simplified Chinese are in mainland China, it would be odd if China's censorship didn't skew the results. Even a lot of ex-pat sites outside of China probably use English.
Microsoft might be censoring the search results with Bing but TFA is a loaded and biased piece that makes nauseating excuses for Google's own censorship whilst their case against MS amounts to "I thought I had some evidence, but it turns out there's another explanation but they could be censoring things even though I admit they're probably not. Still, people will only read my inflammatory headline and that's the main thing".
And no, just because you declare in bold that we are limiting discussion to Chinese ex-pats in the USA, doesn't mean we're going to. My topic was here first.
Regards,
H.
My code wasn't involved in the LSE crash, actually. My code is in some of the lower-level networking systems, thanks for asking.
I like the way rather than point out any weakness in my argument you shot off to investigate me and see if there were any nice ad hominems you could use. I like the way that you consider my fifteen years experience in software engineering some sort of insult. I particularly like the way you carefully snip my old bio to make it sound like crass boasting when it was actually a joke: the full version ends with "so why do I spend half my time explaining to people how to insert pictures into Word documents?" I like all these things you've done because they amuse me. All they show is an attempt to construct poor ad hominems which makes you look like you can't argue.
As to the two lines of your post which contain an argument:
The OP called MS "a bunch of clowns". He began the comparisons at the individual level. I have found that generally, the people who work at the level of writing OS's or large application suites such as MS Office, have too much of an appreciation of the work involved and the difficulty of it to casually put down others that do the same. I've often seen Linux fanboys here on Slashdot slagging off Windows. I don't recall seeing any Linux Kernel developers engaging in the same sort of petty bashing. They know what's involved and they've all made coding mistakes that can kill a system dead (sometimes released, sometimes caught in time). I've done enough larger scale work to know how epic a task like Windows 7 or Excel is. And that is why I asked the OP if he could do better - not because there's any chance a lone individual could, but because his casual laughing and insulting of other developers strongly suggests to me he's never worked at that level. If he came back and said, "actually, I've committed a number of fixes in the Linux kernel," or "I'm one of the Open Office devs" then that would be something. But like I say, these people have gone through the process and tend to not make massive blanket insulting statements like the OP.
No, you don't need to make a better car than Cadillac in order to have an opinion on whether their cars are good or bad. But if you were a car designer, you'd probably be a lot more thoughtful about it. And even if you're not experienced in this matter, you still ought to be able to say "Cadillac cars are crappy because manufacturer X does Y better". I'm typing this in Opera on a KDE desktop. My primary OS is Gentoo. I like GNU/Linux because it has all the tools that I need to work with free, it's more secure than Windows and I can tweak it to do everything I want. But I don't think Microsoft is a bunch of clowns that can't innovate and if someone wants to say they are, they should back it up. I don't think that's too much to ask.
Regards,
H.
Logically, accepting "someone else may do it if I don't" as a justification for your own immoral behavior guarantees a state of immoral behaviour existing. The only possibility of achieving a state without the immoral behavior is to not engage in it oneself. Yes, you are exchanging a certainty of their being immorality for a possibility that there might not be, but some of us consider that progress. And you might be surprised what an example can achieve sometimes.
My take on things.
What were your search terms?
Okay, you're posting all over the place with this stuff. What evidence do you have that Bing is censoring results? Google admits that they censor results. Microsoft say that they do not. So back up what you're saying with something, please. TFA hasn't held up. It makes sense that if the vast majority of online presence in a particular language is in mainland China where online censorship is the rule, that the results of searches for, e.g. Tianamen Square, come up with Tourist Information rather than articles about the protests. But even so, it's not the case that this universally happens. Compare the two image searches posted lower down in this thread, done in Google and Bing. The Google one omits pictures of protests and "tank man". Bing actually has them.
So kindly back up your statements with some evidence, because I'm not seeing it. I'd like some searches in simplified Chinese to back this up, please.
What is this rubbish? You find it "curious that when you search in English, sites from England aren't the top of the list"? English is spoken far more widely than just in Englang, including a certain country called the USA you might have heard of. You'd be surprised if you searched in English and got lots of results in German, though. In contrast "simplified Chinese" is used by mainland China (you can't even include Hong Kong as they don't use it much), the UN and the impressive but nontheless tiny "country" of Singapore. So why do you go all conspiracy theory when the primary search results for a search in simplified Chinese are overwhelmingly sites from mainland China?
Saying that I "assume everyone who speaks Chinese is from China" is showing a complete ignorance of what we're actually discussing.
OP: Microsoft are a bunch of clowns who can't create decent products. Me: Lets see you produce something better than Windows 7 or Excel, or even remotely close to that. You: Three decades ago, Microsoft bought an OS.
I fail to see the logical sequence here. If you're just trying to find ways to put the credit for any good points of MS products onto others, rather than give it to them, then you could at least show some more up to date knowledge and refer to Windows NT which built its networking capabilities on top of FreeBSD (and was later the platform for Windows 2000) and for which I don't think they paid a cent, unlike MS-DOS. But the fact remains that MS have put out some very good software and likely put the OP who's calling them "clowns" to shame. And now that they actually have credible threats to them (Yay! Linux!), they're really getting their act together. Note that I don't give a "Yay! Apple" even though they are also a motivator to MS to improve their products. The reason is that I see Apple as merely Saruman to MS's Mordor. They don't want to overthrow MS, they want to be MS. The various Linux distros are the Fellowship of the Ring in this analogy. Gandalf = Slackware. Aragorn = Red Hat. SuSE has to be Boromir (will betray the rest). Legolas has got to be Ubuntu - has all the style and the looks, bit poncy. Debian would probably be Elrond - totally important and the basis for everyone else's progress, but not going to get the glory. Gimli is surely Gentoo - really impressive if you look at the facts, but ugly and frequently overlooked.
I've gone off on a tangent, haven't I?
Yes, that is correct. Anyone searching Bing in China using English or Russian (in your example) would get the same search results as you or I searching in English or Russian. That's not a loophole, Bing isn't actually censoring anything apparently. It merely returns results preferentially in the same language you search in. And simplified Chinese is pretty much a mainland China thing where, unsurprisingly, there aren't a lot of websites talking about protests or being positive about Falun Gong. The author of TFA comes across as having quite an agenda, imo.
I can't mod you up because I'm posting all over this thread. But thank you for a very useful post.
Smart people will choose products based on their needs and their research on the matter. Commercials are for the people who associate brands with lifestyles (i.e. silly people). Don't be surprised if you find their commercials dumb, be uh, depressed that there exists a target audience for those commercials. Hmmmm. I need to re-think this. :(
Lets see you write an operating system and an Office suite with programs like Excel.
Actually, this gets more interesting having looked into this more closely. It's just about possible that Microsoft is being less evil than Google in this case. Whilst Google admits to deliberate censorship both on its google.cn site and (to a much lesser extent but still to some extent) on its google.com site (they eliminate some Falun Gong results from their image search - they admit this), Microsoft are pleading a different case. Basically, Microsoft have stated that the way their search engine works is to return results with a preference toward sites in the language searched in. Naturally when you search in simplified Chinese characters, which are overwhelmingly used in mainland China as opposed to places like Hong Kong and Taiwan which use the complex form, most of the results in that language are going to be from mainland China. And mainland Chinese websites are, well, not going to be essays about Tiannamen Square or have many pro-Falun Gong material.
I condemn censorship, but Microsoft's explanation is eminently plausible. In fact, if you thought about it, it's a natural consequence of returning search results in a particular language if that language is more or less exclusive to a particular nation that censors.
Google also censor search results in China. And conceivably more effectively if you can't get access to Google sites outside of China. (Typically, Google find a more savvy way of pulling off the technical feat of search-censorship than Microsoft). Yahoo has been the worst of the big three based on what information is available to us - they actually handed over the confidential information of a pro-democracy campaigner over there.
Google also censor results in China. Search for Tiannamen Square or Falun Gong on google.cn and you find just the same whitewashed results as with Bing. The difference is merely one of implementation. Google has done it by censoring the results in their country-specific site. Bing have done it by censoring results when you search using a language form popular in mainland China. It's hard to say conclusively which is least effective. With Google you can search via one of their international sites to get around it. With Bing you can enter search terms in a different language such as English. Both are, of course, subject to the Great Firewall of China interfering when you follow results to places like Wikipedia etc. which is not the fault of either Google or Bing.
So in summary, Google innovates and Microsoft copies. Not much change there, but unfortunately they have both sold out to the Chinese government. Neither is clean.