So TechCrunch thinks Google bailed on China because the going was just too tough. They weren’t the market share leader and had so much to lose that they backed out of the most promising market in the history of the Internet in order to stop the “bleeding.” I tend to disagree with that assessment.
Why, if Google were so afraid of wasteful business practices that they would pull out of their biggest growth market for content products, would they be involved in similarly valueless gambits? Take things like GoogleVoice, Google Wave, the cloud, Android, and projects like that. These aren’t profitable ventures for Google, but may indeed become so at some point, especially Android and Voice. The point is, Google spends all kinds of money on things that make folks scratch their head because they believe there’s money to be made.
China is no different, except that something clear scared the balls off of Google in the process. Be it the communist secret police or a blackmail offer that would’ve been even more embarrassing to Google than the Chinese government-backed breach of Gmail they just revealed, SOMETHING scared Google away from the biggest treasure trove of the next decade. And that something was big. Yet to believe TechCrunch’s assessment, you’d have to assume the move was purely profit-driven and not really borne of any moralistic decision. Again, I tend to disagree. Profit decision or not, at the end of the day, Google DID THE RIGHT THING. Why is it so hard for all these young pay-per-post bloggers to understand we’re talking about brutal social communism?
So TechCrunch’s echoing of the silly notion that China is a bad market for Google because it’s just too hard for them—ahh, that’s justy a goofy idea. Have you ever known Google to back down from a market fight? Me neither. If you answer no, then TechCrunch advises you to “sit the hell down and shut the hell up”. They should rename their web site BlowHard.
Somebody call Mike Arrington and hook his writers up with Critical Thinking 101 at the local community college.
