So next time when you land up in China and decide to find nearest KFC outlet with Google Maps, surely you are going to be disappointed. You could find it out even without maps, but then I am n’t here to write obituary of Google China, which is history now. Or at least as of now, Google has started redirecting its search results from mainland China to Google’s Hong Kong Portal. No Google Map, no Gmail, no Google Reader & above all ‘No Google Search’…Blank…!
For me Google is synonymous to Internet in modern era. It’s not wrong if I say Google is equally synonymous to information I preserved over years and choices I made. Google has shaped my attitude. Information is power with Google. Before Google, I remember searching in cyberspace with Yahoo & sometimes with Alta-vista and often quoted the experience as very poor. Entry of Google in cyberspace just one year before dot-com bust i.e. in year 1999 changed everything. No one had thought ‘Internet search’ would achieve its current stature, back in pre web 2.o era. It was just a beginning. And in last 11 years, Google has dominated most of the aspects of Netizens’ experience in cyberworld. So be it blogs (1999-2000), email (2004), G- reader, G-maps, G-calendar, G-books, Orkut or G-news, Google has everything in kitty and for everyone of us. This user centric innovation helped Google in positioning itself as challenger to Microsoft in just 10 years since inception of its operations. It was just a start.
Google launched its Chinese Search engine in 2006. Since then Google was happy (?) obeying with Chinese government restrictions of not-displaying few search results to end users. So if you would have search ‘1989 Tiananmen Square military crackdown’ or even ‘Dalai Lama’ from mainland China, you were promptly redirected to an error message. This error message symbolized the conflict of interest between the free society where Google was born & so-called free society in China, where Google intended to operate freely. Google entered China (2007) and decided to follow the rules by Chinese Government, keeping an eye on netizens in one of the largest Internet market in the world. But it was not easy or by now in last three years after enduring numerous attacks on its servers, Google has realized this hard fact. There’s huge gap in our understanding of so-called free society and a free society.
Can China live without Google? Perhaps yes! China had an estimated 384 million Internet users at the end of 2009, more than the total US population. Baidu Inc, local search engine held 58.6 per cent of China’s online search market last quarter, compared with 35.6 per cent for Google, according to Analysys International, a Beijing-based technology research company. But why are we just relating Google’s pullout with market shares & revenues? Do we have any other measure to estimate loss to Chinese Netizens?
Loss will be personal to me. We all love Google (with few exception of Chinese regime & their battalion). We love the power it gives in hands of end users to search and extract meaningful information from information debris. Without Google, information available on Internet looks like mere unorganized blocks, waiting to be crawled, and then systematically arranged depending on the content, for the end users. In short, information loses its meaning once we put it in unorganized space of Internet, without Google. Who has power to organize it? Who will do it for us?
With this move, Chinese communist regime gave a clear warning to all those multinational companies, who are operating in China to obey its unwritten rules unquestioned- obey or quit. Google deserved this- either you can stick to your values or fall pray to desires of gaining profits by selling restricted information to users. Google’s choice to exit shows the guts of its leaderships and commitment to new age information society. We aren’t interested in knowing, how it happened or was Baidu behind it all? We just want to know, why it happened? Can it be avoided for sake of information society by looking at larger picture? And if you know the answer, you know that there’s no other option for Google, but to exit. Google will surely come up strongly with its ‘Mobile Strategy’, but will have to keep China out of focus. Microsoft, Baidu & Apple are going to make most of their rival’s exit in near future, but keeping rivalry apart, we should have strongly supported Google’s motive, instead of letting company alone to fight battle against mighty Chinese regime. It’s not an easy decision to make and it will have its long term impact.
This exit will help Google to focus on other segments & markets, mainly India & South Asia. Google will either lay-off its 600 around workforce employed in China operations or migrate it to Hong Kong Operations. For Google, it will a real tough challenge to grow in Asia, without having presence in China, the world’s largest Internet market. It will have to rethink on its strategy to repair losses, but there’s no short-term remedy. Let’s learn the lessons and move forward to accept the fact- China without Google!
