Google's Brin Talks About China Gamble | Hacker News Reader

Google's Brin Talks About China Gamble

online.wsj.com

101 pointsshorbaji52 comments

My wife is Bulgarian, and through her, I'm exposed to a lot of folks who escaped from behind the iron curtain before it fell. These people are a breath of fresh air to me. They understand what freedom is and how precious it is.

While most westerners are trading their freedoms for the promises of security, and smiling foolishly while they do it, I find myself more at home with my wife's group of friends, who take this stuff seriously. I think I'd get along with Mr. Brin just fine.

I like how even though Google is a big company, every time they have something to say, it feels like it came from a regular guy wearing a t-shirt. Maybe they are just really good at their brand marketing.

Except when it's Eric Schmidt doing the talking, for some reason.

'Cause Schmidt doesn't wear a t-shirt. Edit: better picture http://www.internetmarketing-news.de/wp-images/content/googl...

Touché!

People often cite the cynical business reasons why Google pulled out of China, but this article makes me wonder why no one ever cites the reasons why China began to ramp up the pressure on Google these past two years. Baidu has come to its own (at least in the Chinese market), and maybe they don't feel they need Google anymore.

Well, this makes me an even more enthusiastic Google user.

Not only do they show at least some humanity (which is hard for a company of their size), but they've also got big balls.

It's interesting that while this may be a PR spin, few companies would have done it because the risks are much higher than the potential gains for shareholders.

Why does it take big balls to pull out of a market you're losing in?

"Losing" and "winning" aren't terribly relevant in a market. "Profitable" and "not profitable" are much more important. That's not really an answer to your question, but I've never understood why people think it's such a big deal that Google's not the biggest search engine in China.

Well, you have to admit that google's investors have a notion of how well it will be able to transfer its business to developing markets... and so with all its advantages if google can't take first place in china, what does that say about its fundamental ability in non-us markets?

I'd say that the perception that google will dominate search in worldwide markets is worth about $200 per share right now.

Google doesn't dominate every market, but I think they're doing quite well:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/googles-market-shar...

and

http://www.artofseobook.com/search-engine-market-share-by-co...

Now, this is just me imagining.

My guess is that part of the tussle with Chinese authorities which Google does not talk about may be demands made on Google for information on individuals. More than censorship, it may be the surveillance aspect.

It is maybe in this context that Eric Schmidt told users: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Maybe the Chinese authorities told Google: "If you have something on users that you don't want us to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." And Google did not want to stop keeping user information for just China....

I'm very impressed with Google's willingness to back up "Do No Evil" with hard action. For a while, I was wondering if the initial incident from last month was going to fade into obscurity, but the news from this week shows that Google is willing to walk the walk so to speak, and show it really isn't willing to sacrifice its ideals for the sake of a quarterly. Laudable.

That said, I think Brin and much of the commenting is missing a great deal of nuance. I rarely, if ever, see anyone who actually talks extensively with Chinese international students or who does business in China claim that the level of totalitarianism in the PRC actually causes anyone to live in constant fear of the government. Most likely this is a combination of regular Chinese citizens not caring and the government not being the evil empire some commentators appear to think it is.

I agree China needs to open up more both because of basic human rights principles and also because well-executed democracy is an excellent guard against government corruption, but I'm rather frustrated by the lack of attempts to understand the motivations and viewpoints of the PRC.

At its core, can you really blame the PRC for putting social stability first when it's at the head of a country that's seen constant civil war, invasion, and been on the wrong end of Imperialism since the end of the Qing Dynasty? Sure, the societal training wheels need to come off and people need to stop getting thrown in jail for bad reasons, but at least acknowledge that the PRC's actions are not pure black.

"people familiar with .. say ..." This attribution was used 3 times. I hate that.

Way to go Sergey. This reinforces in my mind, the "Do No Evil" motto that Google is famous for.

It also reinforces my opinion that Eric Schmidt is a douche. All he cares about is making a buck, and would sacrifice the motto and public good will towards the company just for quarterly results.

I don't think Schmidt is a douche. I think he's just providing a balanced perspective. I suspect that Larry and Serge would run Google as a charity, if they could. Unfortunately, data centers are expensive as hell. Schmidt is just keeping the balance necessary to sustain Google.

Ok, but Schmidt's decision about China was a miscalculation, let's admit it. It brought a lot of problems for Google, and didn't bring them that much money. They weren't that much profitable there, despite quite a large market share.

There are 1.3 billion people in China. I don't think that any amount of miscalculations could have overcome that fact. It's also not that hard of a sell to say that "As long as we indicate that results were censored, we're doing what we can to bring information freedom to China one step at a time."

I disagree. What Schmidt missed is that Google has had great adoption, not just because of a good product, but because of good will from the public. By acquiescing to China's demands, they lost good will. In the long run, if they took Schmidt's path and became another media outlet for the state, they would probably end up more like Microsoft than Google, losing a lot of good will and customers in the US/Euro.

Despite what anyone says, the US/Euro market is their primary market, and the one they should be primarily concerned with keeping happy.

I applaud Google's announcement that it will be hosting a Wikileaks server to help stop internet censorship.

(yeah right... if Google actually cared about censorship it would host one... the China stuff is just a graceful way for Google to exit a market that it has failed in).

Why do I keep hearing it repeated that "Google failed in China?" They are second place but with a sizable market share, 43% to Baidu's 56% according to this link.

If your company's goal was to have 100% market share and you 'only' had 43%, would you call yourself a failure?

http://gs.statcounter.com/press

I think it has more to do with the fact goog isn't making a significant amt of money, and growth has flatlined. Beyond that goog is STILL in Hong Kong, and mainland China still has access to the .hk site AFAIK

For highly successful companies, it's expected that they will take dominant market share within a reasonable period of time, or else they are viewed as having failed.

More importantly, Google's market share in China is symbolic of its ability to repeat its success in the US elsewhere.... this is the foundation of much of Google's current stock price.

I asked a Google finance guy what percentage of revenue comes from non-US ads and he got all red and refused to say a word. This is a HOT topic at Google and the firm can't afford to show any weakness whatsoever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com