Microsoft Venus was an aborted venture by Microsoft into the low-end personal computing market in the People's Republic of China. The product, a set-top operating system designed to work with low-end televisions (somewhat similar to MSN TV in the United States), was announced by then-Microsoft chairman Bill Gates on March 10, 1999 in Shenzhen, and was to be made available by January 2000; it never made it out of Microsoft's lab however, slowly dying less than a year after its announcement.