Well, if nothing else the past week has certainly been interesting. Google’s blog post declaring a new approach to China has also resulted in a flood of interview requests for comments from Koolanoo CEO Dan Brody, so far including CNN, ABC, VRT Nieuws (Belgium) for TV, and for print Financial Times, Wall Street Journal (blog), Washington Post, New York Times, and Gulf News.
Since lots are asking for comments on this, we’ll just repeat the basic points here:
- This came as a shock to Google’s employees in China. Many have commented on something to the effect of, “Imagine waking up to see that your employer might be exiting the market.” Bummer. Lot of resumes getting updated now.
- It’s a shame if Google does “leave the market” in some way, as they were the last man standing in terms of large foreign internet companies still operating in China, and lots of techies like to use google search.
- Google is most probably not actually “leaving the market” but just stopping filtering results on google.cn, then it’s up to China to see if they allow google.cn or google.com’s Chinese language search to be allowed to be viewed in China or not. This makes Google’s future decision tree much simpler: we launch how we want to launch, and China decides if they want to block it or not.
- Even if Google.cn is blocked, or even if (egads) Google.com is blocked, there will still be a large number of Chinese enterprises targeting the export markets of US, Europe, etc that will want to advertise on Google. Therefore, keeping Chinese employees from online sales operation and customer support for other channels makes sense. In addition, business development for helping partners implement Google search or ads, either Adsense Online or BD, also makes sense. After all, there were thousands of websites using Google ads even before Google had an office here. Also, engineers working on global products will obviously have things to do, either located in this office or others. Only folks looking to be re-tasked are those who worked on Google.cn specifically, or on China-oriented products (of which there are still quite a few). Still, those people won’t have much problem finding a job I’m guessing — send resumes here to our Xoogler head of HR
- This (ie, the attack) seems like the last straw after many years of angst and hassle.
- China product launches had to satisfy difficult demands from both Chinese government and (sometimes more onerous) internal procedures. Once it was decided that the basic policy was no personally identifiable information allowed in China (ie, no Gmail servers, no login, nothing incriminating left onshore so not even the possibility of having to hand something over), meant that every little product needed to be tweaked, to a lesser or greater extent, in order to launch in China. That’s not even considering changes necessary to comply with Chinese law.
- The rumors about an “inside job” by a Google engineer in Shanghai sound spurious at best. Even if source code could be taken (and that’s a big if, considering internal controls), my understanding is that would only allow someone to replicate offering the Gmail service…provided they had thousands or millions of machines in order to run that code. Not necessarily to “hack it.” Plus, it seems like the attack was phishing based, ie emails to random employees saying “click on this,” and the public information indicates the attack came out of Rackspace in Arizona after hopping through Taiwanese IP addresses. But hey, we’re not security experts so check out what other people are saying. Ars Technica has the most interesting roundup we’ve seen, especially the part about “why only subject lines” near the bottom. Check it out.
End of the day, if there’s a silver lining, it’s that this is easily the most international PR exposure the Koolanoo Group, 360quan, iQ browser, and shimao.tv have ever seen, so at least we’re making the most of our 5 minutes of fame.
Comments welcome.
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