This morning, Google has made its decision to leave the mainland market. I hope Google won’t be regretful and makes sure it is the best decision.

Having lived in China, I have witnessed the obsession with Chinese and Internet, which I find fascinating. I agree it’ll spread to mobile with fully functional 3G services in place now. Google will lose an opportunity, that’s why I don’t believe at all they will exit eventually. Chinese will do without Google as they do already without many brands Westeners are so used to (think Ebay, Facebook). But Google will not do without China.

Hopefully Google will not just escape from china, but do something really helpful to millions of Chinese Google users—for instance, technology against Chinese government’s censorship.

Let’s not forget that Google has a small market share in China, mainly because it wouldn’t return search results for music downloads (pirated) and it’s competitors did. So google does do censorship, commercial censorship, and it lost because of it. Now it’s going to lose again because it won’t toe the line on political censorship. East is East and West is West, and never the two shall meet.

With a share less than 20%, contributing only about 1% profit to its headquarter, google.cn has failed the competition with baidu due to its lack of localization. If Google chooses to go, the Chinese will feel nothing about that.

Kelly I second your comment on Ethics. This is a big problem. Most of the Internet users are even under aged and the word widely used, “entertainment,” is a vague one.

This article reiterates the fact that China will become one of the most important Internet markets in the future. Google’s plan to come out of China does not look rational when one takes into account the growth of the Chinese Internet market and Google’s acquisition of AdMob platform. The article suggests that Chinese are using 3G service to surf the Internet. Google needs to capitalize on this trend with it’s Android software and AdMob platform. Arm twisting the government into opening up markets might not help. Also a decision favoring Google looks highly improbable.

The figures and facts are mind boggling. Chinese have literally ‘occupied’ the virtual world. But the question is whether it is going to have a negative effect on the labour productivity in China. With the advancement (read digitalization) in production processes the role of ‘man’ is increasingly getting reduced. No wonder, then, that the urban Chinese population is spending 70% of their leisure time on the Internet.

This has two major implications for the Chinese economy. First, a negative implication. While it may boost the growth of ICE sectors in China, it may not be able to contribute much warmth to the already shrinking exports from China. Second, a positive implication. It will help Chinese consumption to rise. This will be a welcome change to the existing economy structure as it tilts, even if marginally, from exports to domestic consumption.

Two conclusions emerge from this article: (i) Google, and for that matter the US Establishment, should continue to stay engaged with China—whatever may be the provocations, pinpricks, and differences of opinion with the Chinese Govt—in the short and medium term if they are to bring about any meaningful changes in China’s policies on a range of issues.(ii) Internet as a medium transcends language, culture, and ideology and homogenises tastes and values across a vast swathe of humanity. This will continue to fascinate and engage the serious attention of marketing professionals for many decades.

Ethics play a role in the business; so the multinationals claim. But when it comes to making profit or cutting cost the same corporations may put the ethics on the back seat, just as Levi’s did more than one decade back. They pulled out of China citing the poor labor reforms and later saw the lost opportunity and came back to restart manufacturing in China. Google is not going anywhere; these are just some tactics they may be playing around. Google has strong ethics and motto to provide information freely but they can’t dictate the terms to the government accross the world. Google can’t afford to lose the revenues and it just can’t leave millions of people without information (even filtered); would it not be against Google’s ethics?

Yuval Atsmon clearly has a tight grip on what’s happening with Internet use in China. All it takes is a brief foray into one of the many “Technology Palaces” that many cities now spawn, often several within a single city block, to get a sense of the excitement and furor that pervades the use of the Internet and associated technologies, particularly by those between ages 16 and 24! For the past four years I’ve noted a marked and excalating increase in the numbers of young people crowding these places in search of hardware, gaming devices included, and doubtless I’ll see much the same if not greated crowds when I am back in China this May. Excitement is the operative word!

A very interesting article packed with numbers that should make Google think about its strategy in China. Is exiting the only way out for them? Would love to read what McKinsey suggests.

In an article titled ‘China’s internet obsession’ one would expect trends and arguments that were characteristic to China. However, what I found was the re-iteration of the same information that was used to describe the boom of the internet in the US, Europe, and every other country for that matter. The behavior of companies and people towards the internet is similar across the globe. Was this article meant to just include China in that list?

I applaud your article in pointing out the commercial possibilities introduced by China’s exploding interest in the Internet. But I think it gives short shrift to the very active conversation on what appears to be a rising incidence of Internet addiction among Chinese adults and children (A sampling of recent news stories: BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific - Political, Supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring, November 5, 2009 Thursday; The Irish Times, August 18, 2009 Tuesday; Chinadaily.com.cn, January 4, 2010 Monday.) I would hope that any company that gears up to capitalize on the Chinese Internet market will give at least some thought to the ethical questions raised by Internet addiction. Wouldn’t hurt if companies paid more attention to the problem in the US and other western nations, as well.