(Chinese Version)

　　Editor’s Note:

　　On April 1st, Wang Jin, senior vice president of Baidu Group, officially left Baidu. However, he’s already the third senior executive who left Baidu recently. Before him, Wu En, chief scientist of Baidu, and Zeng Liang, general manager of Nuomi, had also left.

　　On the same day, Baidu Doctor was also officially closed. For the past month, TMTpost has paid special attention to the remaining problems after the dissolve of Baidu Health Business Division. Besides, by linking Baidu’s major moves in recent months, we figured out the significance of Baidu’s recent move.

　　We also noticed that Baidu had even made up its mind and begun to downsize, which was quite abnormal at Baidu.

　　All these are not April Fool’s Day jokes. Founded on January 8th 2015, Baidu Health Business Division was officially closed 764 days later.

　　By interviewing former employee at Baidu Health Business Division for the past month, TMTpost attempted to have a better understanding of the development of the business divison from cradle to grave for the past 764 days.

　　“This is actually a good thing,” Chen Hao (pseudonym) told TMTpost in relief. At the beginning of March, almost a month before Baidu officially closed the Baidu Health Business Division, he and several his colleagues were laid off by Baidu.

　　Two months before he joined the Baidu Health Business Division, there were already signs that the business division was facing dissolve: since October 2016, Baidu has stopped updating “Baidu Doctor”’s official Sina Weibo account. A large array of employees resigned in this period, since “nobody wanted to be drowned along with the ship”. Last December, the second-year business plan of Baidu Health Business Division was vetoed, spreading doubt over the business division’s future among employees.

　　Shortly after the Spring Festival, those who chose to stay were finally informed that the business division would soon be officially dissolved.

　　“I received job offers by colleagues from other business divisions the night I was told about the decision. They would say: ‘Now that the Health Business division has been dissolved, come and join us, will you?’” Chen recalled. He got along well with colleagues.

　　According to the internal letter, the company would offer relevant employees job opportunities at other business divisions based on their specific situation. Therefore, Chen followed the instructions and applied for job transfer.

　　However, he never expected that his application failed and he had to resign.

　　“Except for a few engineers, others were all laid off. Even those who already accepted alternative job opportunities at other business divisions were later laid off,” he told TMTpost.

　　Prior to this, Baidu has basically never laid off any worker, except when employees went beyond the bottom line.

　　“We've lost the battle even before it started”

　　Founded on January 8th 2015 and dissolved on Feb 9th 2017, Baidu Health Business Division lasted 764 days. Its product “Baidu Doctor” was also officially closed on April 1st and all the data on the platform was also erased.

　　The announcement, titled “closing announcement”, looked quite inconsistent on the homepage of Baidu Doctor APP. As of March 27th, 206 pieces of comments were left under the announcement. The phrase “what a shame” appeared 45 times, while other comments, including “pity”, “unreliable” and “why”, also appeared several times. It is only in the comment area of the announcement can we realize that it has indeed come to an end.

　　Today, as long as Baidu is linked with keywords such as “health”, the public will be significantly critical. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the business division was finally dissolved, since it seems to be the only politically correct thing to do.

　　However, Chen didn’t think it’s wrong for Baidu to conduct the health business. “There should have been a better alternative,” he told TMTpost.

　　To integrate its various types of mobile health and medical resources, Baidu established Baidu Health Business Division in January 2015. As the online hospital registration market has matured, Baidu launched “Baidu Doctor APP” on January 28th 2015 in due time, providing mainly online hospital registration service.

　　However, since Baidu didn’t have many resource at first, it had no choice but to put online hospital registration resource on Baidu Doctor through cooperation and investment.

　　In addition, Baidu stated that during the first four months of 2015, it had entered into strategic cooperation agreements with Beijing 301 Hospital, Shanghai First Maternal and Child Health Hospital, Beijing Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital. While Baidu agreed to help these hospitals build a patient data collection and medical big data analysis platform, these hospitals will open their high-quality resources to “Baidu Doctor”. However, a former employee at Baidu Health Business Group confirmed to TMTpost, saying that only Beijing Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital followed the agreement.

　　Since hospital registration could be easily quantified, it became the target of Baidu Health Business Division in 2015.