Comments on: Microsoft Search is Down in Its Home Country

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:42:57 +0000

Fair point. I won’t be repeating the same theories.

By: your_friend

your_friend — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:15:04 +0000

I’m not going for most of the “compelling analysis” which sounds a lot like the usual anti-Google slog. Deflect attention from what? Is Google afraid of failure? I don’t think so. Their bottom line is AOK. I also don’t believe the market share gain reasoning. China has very repressive internet policies which include random monitoring, animated police men that appear on users computers and jail time for various political activity. “Rebel” is not a healthy reputation and this is probably reason #1 for lower market share. Until Google gets caught pulling tricks like Microsoft, it is better to take what they say at face value and check the facts that you can. It’s so nice of people to come to the IRC channel and spin it around like this.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:14:41 +0000

I suspect Google just used this as an opportunity to deflect attention.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:16:16 +0000

Verisign say the attacks on Google (and Adobe) are confirmed to have come from the government:

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/01/researchers-identify-command-servers-behind-google-attack.ars

If that’s the case, I’m not surprised Google decided the game of setting up business in China at all was too rigged to bother with.

By: Jose_X

Jose_X — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:02:04 +0000

Google has much to gain. Some of the gain is simply by avoiding the worst of where their brand was headed. They may grow share, but they would also improve upon potential losses.

Despite all of this, it’s a great idea to pressure Chinese government and to gain admiration and unity of people seeking more freedom in China who perhaps before may not have been as active or as united or motivated.

So maybe Google was lucky. In any case, many companies have not taken this action in the past of standing up to Chinese government (being in a position to do so, of course), but perhaps now more will be willing to do so (Yahoo said yesterday that it backs Google’s position).

[And besides the goodwill side of this, Google also appears as a leader and as strong if they end up succeeding. That sort of thing will help their brand at least until they mock it up. We can benefit from this by letting others know that Google uses Linux and lots of open source and does contribute back to an extent. There is no reason Google's brand should rise without a part of their business model and tools not also gaining some of the spotlight.]