Highlights

What's behind Google farce

(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-03-22 17:53

Why does Google.cn threaten to leave China?

Business Tactics?

Google defeated fairly, Times columnist said

2010-01-29

Google blamed business losses on China's Internet monitoring policies. But Karabell indicates it is forceful competition that is pushing Google out of China's market.

"Google has not been doing all that well in China, as many have noted in recent days, badly trailing the domestic Chinese search company Baidu," Karabell commented on Time.com. Karabell said Yahoo and eBay also failed to take root in the soil of China's information economy, he said. Yahoo was defeated by native-born Alibaba.com, and eBay was defeated by China's Taobao, he wrote.

Google, don't be evil?

2010-01-29

Google's announcement of refusing censorship certainly carries a heavy political connotation. Some Chinese netizens asked why Google didn't object to censoring the search results when it started business in China years ago and the censorship mechanism was harsher at that time. Why didn't Google pull out of China when Chinese netizens protested against the installment of the filter software Green Dam last year? Why Google？Why now？

The timing of Google's protest against censorship and its threat of existing from China can not be easily explained by Google when we consider that Google was invited to have dinner with higher Obama administration officials and the US government also got involved in the dispute in a high-profile way.

Google's exit threat just a business tactic

2010-01-18

China's Web environment and the China-US trade relationship are among the topics that have been discussed. But it's inappropriate to play up the issue, or turn it into a political dispute.

Above all, Google's decision is no bigger than a corporate maneuver, no matter where the company comes from or how powerful it is.

What's Google's game plan?

2010-01-15

This was probably what Google had in mind before making this move, but there were too many assumptions behind this kind of wishful thinking. Most significantly, the estimations about the government payoffs can be very inaccurate. So you bet, the company is doing everything it can to decrease the government payoffs for the fight option.

Simply put, Google believes it can force the Chinese government to meet its market demands if it threats to pull out. To ensure this to happen, the company employs a wide array of tactics to make it painful for the Chinese government to fight. Here are some of the things they did.

Google is simply not successful in China

2010-01-15

The problem is Google.cn simply cannot compete with its main domestic rival, Baidu.com. A report from China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) shows that as of September 2009 Baidu.com's market share in China stood at 77.2 percent, far stripping Google.cn's 12.7 percent. In fact, the majority of Google's users in China choose Google.com as their first choice.

After nearly five years' pushing for the brand of Google.cn and after investing heavily in Google.cn, their efforts in the Chinese market are simply not successful, to say the least. Kai-fu Lee's abrupt departure from Google in September 2009 wasn't helpful, either. To answer for its investors and for shareholders to understand a not so favorable environment of global economy, Google's decision to pull out of China comes as no surprise.