I had a dinner with Crusoe Mao, Chief Architect of Sony Playstation, in a Shanghai-based Chinese Tea Resturant. The meal is great because all the food are preserved by high-quality tea. It's assumed very healthy and we also enjoyed a lot on a new kind of green tea named "Anji Bai Cha".
Thus the topics expanded in such a good environment. We talked about GFW, as well Google's strategy in China. Crusoe, though a very techie person, shared some really insightful ideas can be referenced by Google decision makers to solve the painful situation in China?not only the currnet business part, but the bold vision of future.
Everyone knows that there is a sharp competitors for Google in China, called Baidu. The 2.5 billion market cap company now "
tops among all operators in terms of search traffic with 46.5% market share"(iResearch). Google lost the market share not for business strategy but for user experience. Google do a great job search over Internet including for Chinese content. However, many google fans has to switch to Baidu when they frequently met web page reset by the GFW(Great Firewall). Though Google is trying to deploy more and more presence in China by building up local sales/marketing and R&D team, the effort can't be so obvious under the shadow of censorship.
Will compromise a better solution to survive in China, Google? Maybe, and more possibly maybe not. Google search didn't comply to keywords filtering requirement in China before they
compromise last year. Anyway, the controversal compromise can't really take effect because it even enraged loyal user group in China, which ever protested online when Google service was blocked by government year 2002 for the first time. The protest eventually 'force' government to release the block after several days. If Google do comply to the opaque censorship(till now, there is no any public information tell people who takes the responsibiliy of censorship). Google, as well other web site, can self-censor first to please government, while losing the respect from their loyal end users. They should rethink of the strategy while they are still losing market share.
Crusoe's idea is simple. Don't comply, but more penetration. Once someone lose their principle, they will lose everything as bottom line easily. He thought the best strategy of Google is to acquire more Chinese top web sites with their existing capital power and inject google services with those sites. It's possible, from my rough calculation, google can try to acquire top 10 innovative web sites in China(not including those sucks portal sites) spending no more than 2BUS$. But Google has to be low profile to do that to make sure less attention by government and those "angry youth" who are easily be tiggered nationialism like
Carlyle's failure on Xugong case.
With such move, instead of trying to cook localized products like
Mr. Kaifu Lee wants to do. Crusoe's idea is very direct, "Kaifu don't need waste time to invent products Chinese may like, instead, he can take more time to evalute and invest more local promising internet startups."
Really fancy ideas from Crusoe, but I do agree and enjoy it for hours last night, in our tea-baked healthy food.
