Microsoft Realizes Everything's Not Cool In China

Holy crap are we proud of Microsoft today! No, we know you're braced for this to take a dramatic turn towards the ironic at any moment, but straight-up, this is good stuff. The BBC is reporting that Microsoft has threatened to stop doing business in China if the regime there doesn't back off on the human rights violations. The particular offense that has Redmond reconsidering the Chinese market? China's crackdown on bloggers!

"Things are getting bad... and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there," he [Fred Tipson] told a conference in Athens.

"We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it's unacceptable to do business there."

"We try to define those levels and the trends are not good there at the moment. It's a moving target."

Ok, granted these comments were made at an Internet Governance Forum where Microsoft was being accused of colluding with the Chinese government and "not doing all they could to enable freedom of expression," and there's a difference between saying something and actually doing it, but we still appreciate senior policy council Fred Tipson's making some of the right noises.

Check out the China Blog List for, well, you get it. They list English language blogs.