SubscribeRethinking Google’s China Strategy
It seems that a discussion about Google’s China strategy is being motivated by Isaac Mao’s open letter to Google Founders. In case you don’t know who is Isaac Mao, he is one of the earliest Chinese bloggers, VC, blogger conference organizer, and influential thinker.
In his open letter, he listed three ideas for Google founders to consider. I briefly list them here and append some of my own thoughts.
Set up a 1B US$ corporate venture fund to invest in China’s Internet pioneer sites and cutting edge companies. This is a suggestion that if you cannot bring working stuff yourself, you can still play a capital game. No surprise in hearing this, since Isaac is a VC himself. It looks like Google has been considering this by investing in Xunlei. A side effect of this approach is that by investing in more pioneer sites in China, Google can effect corporate culture in these local startups, further it will have a chance to have more impact in Chinese Internet. Loyal users are the ones that have the same value of goodness with the company.
Develop anti-censorship tools and service for global Internet users. Isaac think this won’t cause Google’s operation in China into trouble. We wonder if this will work. In fact there’re lots of anti-censorship project in the world. Experienced users already can reduce the effect of censorship into a minimum level. The problem in China is that if you are an influential service, you should cooperate with the government, or you will be cut, like Technorati. Another way around is to take activities to reduce the coverage affected by the censorship, since large amounts of sites that currently in censor are just un-questionable.
Increase the incentive to Chinese Google Adsense users. We recall that we have introduced why Baidu is more advertiser friendly. We do have noticed that Adsense will return irrelevant result to Chinese webpage, it’s quality is simply not as good as its English version.
One additional idea to Google is that you should learn from Baidu in China, especially how they are operating their services. Simply translating Google’s global service into a Chinese interface, probably plus a local database, won’t work.
Most Readers of this blog have been tracking business in China for a long time. What do you think of Google’s China strategy? Will Isaac’s three ideas work?
Also read: Oreilly, China Herald, Rebecca MacKinnon
Update: Philipp Lenssen just got an idea about Google Censorship API. Very interesting idea, but I just doubt if government will cooperate with a company in this way.
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