CRI听力:MSN to Stay Put in China

Soon this all too familiar noise.

Will be gone and it will be all about this.

Except here in China where you'll be able to have both.

Well for the mean time.

While MSN users in China do not have to be concerned about Microsoft's decision just yet, the hundreds of thousands of Chinese people living abroad do.

Su Zihao has just arrived in Melbourne to begin his undergraduate business degree at Deakin University.

"It's definitely going to cause some inconvenience to all the users, Chinese people overseas can't use MSN with their friends back in China. So we need to use other chatting tools, and I think most people would switch to QQ for video chatting."

Many MSN China users who use the service for business purposes have expressed concern on their micro blogs about the possibility of MSN also closing here.

There is fear of important business contacts being lost.

But MSN user Wang Lan, who is an admin officer at media agency Piech Asia Enterprises isn't worried.

She says that these days more and more people are only using MSN for chatting between colleagues in the workplace, so she's not phased if MSN is closed in China.

"A lot of our friends including me are using MSN a lot in the work but after that we still have a lot of online blog, the album, we still keep that in QQ but only use MSN to communicate in the work. Most of us also have the account in Skype so we can continue to use Skype I don't think that it will affect people a lot."

But in a country where, Skype-use is relatively low and domestically-owned online communication tools dominate the market, if Microsoft wants to keep it's users they will have to plan carefully.

Dong Xu, an analyst at Analyst International, says that it is inevitable that MSN China will close in the future and a successful transition will depend on several factors.

"So once MSN is closed in China, people will try to find its replacement. As for whether they will change to Skype or a China-based online communication tool, there are several factors to consider: whether the cost of transferring their contacts from MSN to Skype will be low enough, and whether Microsoft will help users to minimize users' loss of contacts in the transferring process. If Microsoft does not do its best in these aspects, it might lose its customers. "

Either way, this sound..

Will still be resounding in offices in China for some time to come.

For CRI, I'm Alexandra Blucher.