The plight of googlenomics
The recent and rapid development of google exit-gate has grabbed my
attention much tighter than the dreary quarterly report and I reckon
rightly so. Even though I'm normally a pretty nonchalant kinda guy
towards these plays of corporate upmanship and courting in search of
market share and profit, I do harbour a great deal of goodwill towards
google, let's be clear. Throughout my colored career i have almost
relied on google to get me through the vast majority of tough issues.
Be some sample code search, a few journal search, background check,
news trail findings, rss goodness, image nonsense and early top gear
episodes in now defunct google video, to the most grateful Berkeley
dudes answer through google answer (also now defunct), I have
countless examples of how google has indeed make my own insignificant
life infinitely better and not costing me a single cent. I'm not a
frequent user of google.cn coz to me it really just a communist dumbed
down version of the better google. Even the layout of google.cn is
backward and very 90's. Still i would bet my bottom dollar it's
hundred times better than the baidu crap. I'm never one to be on the
Chinese government side when it comes to Chinese issues, but this time
it just seemed even uglier. Exceptional circumstances must exit to
aggravate the situation for google to take such drastic measure. Any
profit making market with a potential to grow warrants a careful and
long term tratment by the hq and google isn't stupid. The key question
is why GCD may wish to push the case to such extremes for google. I'm
sure google was complying to the best of their calculated abilities to
various censorship requests and back door leaking orders so the GCD
keeps a tap on Chinese google users. Wot more could they want or need
above those human rights abusing censorship needs they already placed
on google?could they just simply want google to play the role of
eternal small player foreigner company and never threaten baidus
domination so they won't have to increase reources to monitor google
which is ultimately us-owned? Ie, they don't want google to grow any
more than the 27% or 33% of the market share they already own? They
foresaw a google.cn that will eat baidu alive? These speculations
might never find answers. The stupendous lack of compentency in both
understanding and management of the information indstry could also be
another plausible possibility which explains the inability to
effectively manage the industry growth. As other bloggers already
said, this is to me an eerie display of bridge burning behaviour to
the z-th degree. Any reasonable attempt to continue operating as the
status quo will probably be remote if not obliterated after such
public revelation of hatred towards Chinese state authorities. Can
google or china live without each other? Totally google probably could
try to enter the market in other joint venturey forms askin to yahoo
and amazon, but then it wouldn't be a very googley thing to do. The
real loser is indeed the poor Chinese internet suffers. These buggers
will never had the tools I had in my disposal when looking for
answers, wasting time image search, lose time on google news, pinpoint
free code, use the best calendaring and cloud based office suite. But
then again Chinese can just counterfeit these as well, because nobody
will sue anyway.
