{"id":172267,"date":"2010-01-12T22:02:58","date_gmt":"2010-01-13T03:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stoth.com\/2010\/01\/12\/google%e2%80%99s-china-stance-more-about-business-than-thwarting-evil\/"},"modified":"2010-01-12T22:02:58","modified_gmt":"2010-01-13T03:02:58","slug":"google%e2%80%99s-china-stance-more-about-business-than-thwarting-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/172267","title":{"rendered":"Google\u2019s China Stance: More about Business than Thwarting Evil"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"bej80304121112.hmedium\"Writing about China as an American is always tricky, but nowhere near as tricky as what an American company faces doing business there. Let me say upfront, I don\u2019t envy Google. The company has had more success in China than a lot of other big Valley names, but isn\u2019t and will likely never be the market leader. And to get that far, many in the West feel Google has had to compromise its \u201cdo-no-evil\u201d ethics by agreeing to some of the government\u2019s censorship rules. Google has been damned either way: China is too big of a market to ignore, but getting as far as they have has come at a steep price to their reputation and international (read: Western) integrity.<\/p>\n

Enter the now famous blog post<\/a> (that was notably, only on the English-language site) saying that Google was no longer playing by the Chinese government\u2019s rules and was prepared to close down Chinese operations if it came to that. Valley elites erupted into applause on Twitter and blogs saying Google was showing more backbone than the US government and was a model of integrity for the world.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll give Google this much: They\u2019re taking a bad situation and making something good out of it, both from a human and business point of view. I\u2019m not saying human rights didn\u2019t play into the decision, but this was as much about business. Lest we get too self-righteous as Westerners, we should remember three things:<\/p>\n

1. Google\u2019s business was not doing well in China.<\/strong> Does anyone really think Google would be doing this if it had top market share in the country? For one thing, I\u2019d guess that would open them up to shareholder lawsuits. Google is a for-profit, publicly-held company at the end of the day. When I met with Google’s former head of China Kai-fu Lee in Beijing last October, he noted that one reason he left Google was that it was clear the company was never going to substantially increase its market share or beat Baidu. Google has clearly decided doing business in China isn\u2019t worth it, and are turning what would be a negative into a marketing positive for its business in the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

2. Google is ready to burn bridges.<\/strong> This is not how negotiations are done in China, and Google has done well enough there to know that. You don\u2019t get results by pressuring the government in a public, English-language blog post. If Google were indeed still working with the government this letter would not have been posted because it has likely slammed every door shut, as a long-time entrepreneur in China Marc van der Chijs and many others said<\/a> on Twitter. This was a scorched earth move, aimed at buying Google some good will in the rest of the world; Chinese customers and staff were essentially just thrown under the bus<\/a>.<\/p>\n

3. This is only going to be a trickier issue in the next decade.<\/strong> Think the Shanda acquisition<\/a> of Mochi Media was an isolated event? Think again. Chinese Web companies are building huge cash hoards and valuable stock currencies and it\u2019s still a comparatively young Web market. Increasingly, these companies could be likely buyers of US startups\u2014not the other way around. Will the Valley\u2019s rhetoric stick then?<\/p>\n

This may be the most shocking part: In retrospect Yahoo has played China far better than Google. It pulled out of the country years ago, knowing it wouldn\u2019t win and owns nearly 40% of the Alibaba, a company that very definitely knows how to grow in China. Long-time journalist Bill Bishop<\/a> \u2014who hasn\u2019t always agreed with my China coverage in the past\u2014pointed this out, adding \u201cNot often Yahoo looks smarter than Google.\u201d<\/p>\n

Crunch Network<\/em><\/strong>: CrunchBase<\/a> <\/em>the free database of technology companies, people, and investors<\/p>\n

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Writing about China as an American is always tricky, but nowhere near as tricky as what an American company faces doing business there. Let me say upfront, I don\u2019t envy Google. The company has had more success in China than a lot of other big Valley names, but isn\u2019t and will likely never be the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}