Baidu Hi

» see im.baidu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

baidu products did not cross to turkey. they did not have to. baidu was a search engine for china, an instant messenger for china, a maps service for china, a question-and-answer board for china. honestly, the chinese internet stack ran on its own dns and its own social-graph by the time baidu hi launched in march 2008. i had heard of baidu the search engine through tech press by then, the way most non-chinese engineers heard about it, as the local market answer to google after google's beijing operations got squeezed out. baidu hi was the messenger layer of that same parallel internet.

baidu announced the im product on february 29 2008. the strategic logic was the one tencent had executed a decade earlier with qq, which was to use a messenger as the front door for everything else the company sold. baidu wanted hi to be the desktop client that opened to a baidu search box, a baidu post bar link, a baidu space blog, in one ui. tencent qq already occupied that desktop position with a usage base in the hundreds of millions. msn messenger china still had a foothold among urban office workers. baidu hi was launching into a saturated lane.

the consumer numbers never broke the qq grip. wechat launched in january 2011 and the mobile imanager category was over inside two years. by 2014 the consumer baidu hi client had stopped getting any meaningful new features. older clients released before november 2016 were formally scheduled to stop service by the end of that year. baidu repositioned what remained as a workplace tool, and on april 26 2020 the consumer-side baidu hi name was retired in a rebrand to infoflow (如流), the enterprise collaboration platform that still ships today.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the announcement in february 2008 came with the full baidu corporate communications machine behind it. li yanhong (robin li) was already operating baidu as the dominant search engine of china by share. the im launch was framed as the natural extension into communications. honestly, the press releases at the time mentioned text, image, voice chat, group conversations, large-file transfer, integrated cloud storage features. that feature set on day one was respectable for 2008, even competitive with qq on paper.

the product page lived at im.baidu.com and got top-of-search-page promotion across baidu properties for the first two years. in those days. the install came as a windows executable, with a slightly heavier ui than msn messenger and a slightly lighter ui than qq. group chat was bundled in from day one. by 2010 the registered-user count was in the tens of millions, which sounded large outside china but was an order of magnitude smaller than the qq cohort baidu was trying to dislodge.

~ the fall ~

this part you had to be inside the chinese consumer internet to feel, and i was not. tencent's qq install was already running on essentially every windows xp install in china by the late 2000s. school computer labs shipped with qq preinstalled. internet cafes shipped with qq preinstalled. baidu hi was the second messenger you installed if you installed it at all, which most people did not. honestly, the network effect was decided before baidu shipped.

the bigger shift was wechat. tencent released weixin in january 2011 as a smartphone-first messenger that ran outside the qq desktop chassis. by 2013 wechat had passed three hundred million monthly users and the chinese consumer messenger market was settled on a mobile axis baidu had never aimed at. baidu's own mobile efforts went into baidu mobile assistant and other directions. the hi brand was left running on a desktop world that was draining out.

~ the postmortem ~

the death was administrative rather than dramatic. older baidu hi clients lost compatibility on a rolling schedule through 2016 and 2017 under the passport security upgrade. the install base became enterprise users by attrition, mostly inside baidu's own corporate accounts and a few customer companies who had adopted the platform for internal use. on february 11 2020 baidu announced the enterprise pivot, opened the product to outside companies. on april 26 2020 it became infoflow, the consumer baidu hi name was retired in the rebrand. infoflow itself continues as a workplace collaboration product as of 2026, with ernie (文心一言) ai integration added in 2023.

the consumer im story closed without a single big funeral notice. it just stopped being mentioned in baidu's earnings calls.

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