Interesting debate bubbling up across the web today on whether Google is joining EBay and Yahoo! in failing in China. The debate was spurred by analyst Shaun Rein who writes over at Seeking Alpha:
In surveys my firm conducted with Chinese youth in Shanghai between the ages of 18 and 24, over 80% said that they used Baidu as their primary search engine with Google a far second at just under 20%. Google’s poor faring over the last year has caused a lot of analysts to lump them with eBay and other internet failures in China, with many arguing that foreign internet companies can never do well here.
He concludes:
Many critics have said that Google has failed in China. I agree with this but not for the reasons that most critics highlight – censorship. While that is a sexy topic amongst many Americans, Google has failed for much more prosaic reasons. They should learn from eBay’s failure or Yahoo’s experience where too little management control was ceded to the team on the ground.
At China Herald, Fons Tuinstra takes issue with some of this, noting:"...he goes too fast when separates the censorship issue from what is according to him the major reason for Google to fail in China: failing management, or too much US involvement with the China operation. Google mainly followed a US-agenda, did not listen to its Chinese customers. So, when it came up with this ludicrous censored search engine, they made something the Chinese internet users did not want. And on top of that, it annoyed the hell out of their US constituency. That is two management mistakes in one!"
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