What will happen if Google leaves China?
- Source: Global Times
- [22:08 January 17 2010]
- Comments
Liu: Google's decision to pull out of China may have something to do with their business status.
Google came into the Chinese market around four years ago, and they are still in the initial investment period, which means the payback is low, if any.
Therefore, Google made the decision to pull out of China when the governing regulation collided with their business principle.
For a multinational corporation like Google, the Chinese market is indeed large, but their chances of profiting were relatively small, so they decided to let go. For them, this is not really a loss.
GT: How will it affect your life?
Fan: I don't use google.cn, I don't believe Google won't continue to provide content in Chinese language or shut down gmail service to Chinese users.
Few of my friends use google.cn. To them, the only difference is two Chinese characters versus six English letters on the main website. Most of the content is the same.
In the long run, innovation and competition in Chinese Internet market will miss a strong rival, but Google is not the only alternative to Baidu.
There is Microsoft's Bing, local Internet companies and Yahoo.
Baidu will still keep strong innovation incentives since it has to compete with Google in the global market. Nobody believed that Baidu can be as big as it is today, but it made it.
Xu: As an owner of an IT business, I have a lot to think about now. Google.cn provides a lot of services, such as free cooperate mailbox and calendar services to small-and-middle-sized companies like ours.
I am a gmail user. I have over 9,000 e-mails in my inbox, including contracts and other important documents concerning customers. I won't take the risk of losing these files if Google leaves China.
Therefore I am thinking of moving the cooperate mailbox and personal mailbox to other servers, which would be a big and costly change to make.
Besides the above-mentioned issue, with Google pulling out of China, many of the applications, such as Google Music and Google Map, might no longer be available.
