So, the big news of the day is that Google is reconsidering whether or not to continue to do business in China. It's getting plenty of coverage and lots of folks are rightly praising Google's move to cease censoring results (which will basically get them blocked by the Great Firewall). Still, i've not heard a lot of folks address the elephant dragon in the room. Would China notice?
China, always one to… uhm… innovate, has lots of carbon smudged innovations, and there are plenty of Chinese search engines to choose from, including Baidu, which according to an article published in July of 2009, controls 61% of the Chinese market. Google's share was only 29%. That's a strong second, but hardly the 72% market share that Google holds in the US.
So, basically, Google China is roughly the Sino equivalent of Yahoo. How many folks do you think would be terribly upset if Yahoo Search were to shut down in a month or two? Probably about the same number of folks that were upset when they did and switched to using Bing.
So, while i'm glad that Google is taking a hard stance against a fairly large bully, but of the currently 298 million Chinese internet users, around 182 million of them, more than half the population of the US, more than any population but two other countries, won't even notice.
So, taking a stand against a country that causes you nothing but headaches, and where you're not exactly rocketing up the charts may not be quite as noble as you'd think. Something to think about, huh?
