Felix Cohen, a technical consultant from Headshift, a technology and social media consultancy, said: “Undoubtedly the majority of Google’s share of the search market will go to Baidu, if Google pulls out of China. Some may go to Yahoo! and a negligible amount will go to Microsoft, as Bing is still very new and has not penetrated the market.” However, Mr Cohen believes that there are greater issues at play for both companies, which also prevent them from following Google’s lead. “Microsoft has a complicated relationship with China at several different levels. It has its web presence and web business but the software side of the company is under threat from China’s high piracy levels. Fake copies of its programmes and operating systems really undermine its efforts in this side of the business – so it needs to keep China onside if it is to successfully lobby the government into introducing effective antipiracy laws. “Microsoft would be loath to side with Google while trying to have illegal filesharing and piracy regulated in China.