Inside Google's China misfortune

yeah, that was a weird conclusion...it says right there in the linked blog post

"instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page."

Perfect example. The Google IME was nowhere near the first of its kind; it just became popular with non-native speakers because Google didn't cram in advertising like its Chinese predecessors and made it free. The algorithms involved are technically simple and the basic data structures are multigrams indexed as a binary tree or HMMs.

The fact that developers had to steal data to do it instead of rolling their own corpus is a perfect example of the sort of chronic failure I'm talking about. Another is the fact they licensed Kingsoft materials (built off Linguistic Data Consortium data) instead of developing their own. Why outsource data development when you can hire people for under $2k per month to just do it for you?

The English language media typically focuses on Google's genuine political problems because it wants to use the company as an indicator for the state of US-China relations. So people slam Baidu (an innovative company!) as a copycat and no-one remarks on the way Google's behavior suggests no serious effort or willingness to tackle the non-trivial or data-intensive problems that crop up in the semantic analysis of Chinese text. It is possible Google was doing really innovative stuff that I haven't heard about, but the fact that Mountain View made the decision to pull out of the country without even informing its China office is yet another data point suggesting the China office wasn't doing anything terribly worthwhile. Google shut house the way you'd fire an unproductive staff member.

At a minimum, this lack of execution and/or attention to competing through innovation is embarrassing. Not for the main office which is focusing on language agnostic technologies. But it is bad for Google China and I would even go so far as to call it borderline incompetent. You can bet the parent company is heavily invested in semantic search in English, and Chinese is arguably a more important language for text analysis and retrieval in the 21st century.

>I doubt that you need a dedicated "government relations team" in countries other than China.

yep. A bunch of engineers got together and certified all these MS products with Russian Federal government on pure technical merits. Have you checked the place of Russia on the world corruption list?

http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/...

The China actually is listed as "cleaner" than Russia corruption-wise. And politically - well, Russia doesn't censor Tiananmen square, so on this one specific point Russia may be scoring a bit better :)

>As for ordinary public relations, in Russia they are executed by women more often than not.

So, you don't see any difference between governmental and public relations in Russia? You aren't kidding, right?

the point isn't about "lesser". It is about ability to communicate effectively and get things done with a government bureaucrat operating in the male chauvinistic environment. The phrases downstream in the article describe completely expected situation:

>Zhu was better able to communicate with Mountain View. But she had her hands full fending off Chinese government directives.

So they effectively improved interface to Google HQ instead of the interface to the government. That's very typical of western companies still learning how to operate outside of the Western culture.