Google just moved their Chinese search engine to Hong-Kong. While people tend to say it’s because they lost the “war” against Baidu or that they were not making money and needed an excuse to get out, I don’t think that’s the main reason. I would say, they did it to protect the rest of their market i.e. Google users around the world.
How is Google making money? Pay-per-click advertising.
Why do they have such an effective PPC service? They target the right ads to the right people.
How do they do that? With the HUGE amount of data they collect from their users.
Why do their users let them collect so much personal data and are happy with it? They trust Google and in return, users get excellent services.
Their competitive advantage is the data they collect from the relationship they have with their users. For those who don’t know, Google creates personal and corporate profiles from data they get from Analytics, Gmail, Search, iGoogle, Blogger, Google Voice, Maps, etc. However, many like myself, continue to use their services because I am confident that this data is being used in a way that would not upset me.
I don’t think it was the Chinese operations that were at risk but rather their competitive advantage they would lose. What would the rest of the world think if there were more breaches? What if Google had to give some of their data to the Chinese government? That would undermine the public trust and the Google users would move somewhere else. Bing has much “better” privacy policies but who cares? If there is an incident in the future, people will care.
This should be a good lesson for your company. Respect your users, show them that trust is the most important thing inside your organization and your users will return you the favor… trust me :-)
Katy
April 5th, 2010
great post, Taotao! Well said.