Baidu just brought on ex-Microsoft exec Qi Lu lead all aspects of the Chinese search giant’s business from sales to technology development. “Lu, an architect of Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella’s strategy for artificial intelligence and bots at Microsoft, will take up his new post with immediate effect,” Bloomberg reports. “Every Baidu business unit head will report to Lu, a respected technologist who ran the Office and search groups during his tenure at Microsoft.”

Microsoft has announced the acquisition of AI startup Maluuba. The Canadian company specializes in natural language-processing technology. “As part of the plan, Microsoft will also get renowned AI expert Yoshua Bengio aboard as an advisor,” Fortune notes. “Bengio, who serves in that capacity already for Maluuba, is professor of computer science and operations research at the University of Montreal and heads the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.”

Google just debuted a new key management service for its Cloud Platform. The new offering should “help enterprises -- especially in regulated industries like healthcare and banking -- to create, use, rotate and destroy their encryption keys in the cloud,” TechCrunch reports. “The aptly named Google Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS) is now available as a beta in select countries.”

Google has released information on work in progress for its Accelerated Mobile Pages project in 2017. One project explains a way to connect behavior to user actions that will allow publishers to build responsive interactive experiences not offered today. Rich ecommerce experiences are also on the table, including support for product galleries, tabbed content navigation and ecommerce analytics.

Apparently, Douglas McIntyre is counting. Alphabet's recently launched Pixel smartphone became the company's one-hundred and fifty-seventh product that it supports and owns. The products include Google search, Android mobile OS, YouTube, and Chrome. It also includes AdWords, AdSense and AdMob. And let's not forget Google Docs, Sheets, and Drive. McIntyre lists all in a recent post.

Responding to criticism, Microsoft just vowed to make a series of privacy-related changes to Windows 10. “The changes to Windows 10 will roll out initially in an upcoming Windows Insider preview build, perhaps as soon as this week, and will reach the general public with the release of the Windows 10 Creators Update this spring,” ZDNet reports.

Google has repeatedly refused to provide the Labor Department with employee compensation records and other information as part of an audit designed to ensure the company is not discriminating against workers based on gender or race, according to a complaint filed this week by the U.S. Labor Department with the Office of Administrative Law Judges. The Associated Press points to the filing and reports that Google has struck a series of deal with federal government agencies during the past 10 years, but those deals would become void if Google doesn't comply.