Well that was fast. Just a few days after Qihoo 360 quietly launched a news app (pictured on the right), the app has been taken back down again. What’s the reason for the ultra-fast takedown? Qihoo never meant to launch it in the first place.
Qihoo vice-chair Qu Xiaodong explained to Sina Tech that the app was the creation of a small internal team that had been working on an experimental news app as a side project. Generally speaking, Qihoo encourages these small, employee-driven side projects as they’re a great source for creative new ideas, but in this case the folks behind the app actually launched it before getting the full OK from the company’s leaders. According to Qu, the app was then subsequently discovered and scrapped for “not fitting with the company’s product development direction.”
As Qu himself said, Qihoo has traditionally been focused on platform products and does not, like some of its competitors, operate a network of news portals (though it does now have a news page connected to its search engine). News isn’t really in the company’s DNA, so squashing the news app makes perfect sense. But another factor — one Qu didn’t mention — is that operating a web news service opens a Chinese company up to all sorts of new regulatory issues since the Chinese government prefers to keep a fair amount of control over what news is reported. It’s not hard to see why Qihoo would want to avoid giving itself new regulatory hurdles to jump through just to expand into a business it doesn’t really want to be involved with in the first place.
(via Sina Tech)
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