Missing a trick
Wouldn't April 1st be more appropriate?
Google may exit China on April 10, according to a report citing an unidentified sales agent for the company. The Shanghai-based China Business News also cites a Google China employee saying that the company will announce its Chinese plans on Monday, March 22. This will apparently include information on how it will compensate …
This is typical Chinese negotiations when things reach the Mexican stand off stage. Barter like f+++ for the hardware until theres no profit, and then the spare parts contract comes up for renewal, which the chinese sign off without looking at, and that's where you make your money, on the spare parts. Google do not need a search presence in China, just Ad brokerage on whatever replaces it.
Whatever it is fashionable, to think about Google's motives, it is quite legitimate to suspect those motives of Baidu and Tencent (no one does so, of course, because many people outside China are unaware of who Tencent and Baidu even are.) Now Google is walking out of China, leaving the world's largest internet user base in the hands of Baidu, Tencent, and the assorted minnows, who are willing to play at along to Chinese laws, such as Yahoo and MSN.
Most of the things that are written about Google, here on the Register (world's biggest single-ownership network; end-to-end delivery and control of all internet access; active monitoring and reporting of all user activity, and so on) - while possibly NOT true of Google - almost certainly ARE true of Baidu and may be true of Tencent - they're not actually doing evil, you understand: just taking the pragmatic appraoch, required of anyone wishing to do business in th People's Republic.
Two days ago, the Register reported the words of a 'certain network researcher', who estimated that Google was third, in size, behind 'two other network providers' that he couldn't name for 'Commercial Reasons'. Well, I'd like to suggest Tencent and Baidu as two extremely likely candidates - as networks that are far larger than Google.
I would also like to suggest 'Commercial' activities such as the monitoring and restricting of Internet access to Chinese citizens, as exactly the kinds of things that might be, both extremely rewarding, from a financial point of view - but also the sort of work that someone might be a bit shy of naming - if they were to be 'commercially' involved in it, themselves.
Whatever. Phear The Google, if it pleases you to do so: here in the West, we still have to invent our Boogiemen.
am I am just summising here:
perhaps its because when google asked China for help in locating said perpetrators, China turned the other cheek stating quite unequivocaly to Google that their relationship is purely one of take take take.
As a result, Google in its pi$$ed of state decided theyare not going to play ball either.
What follows is probably a long protracted discussion about who f$cked who over, whlst at the same time acting like the proverbial swan as though nothing is the matter.
The result of the discussion is that google has probably tried to dominate somewhere it just isnt welcome and as a result, is leaving.
thats my own take on the matter.
See comment: "i wonder what they stole"...
The Chinese hackers must've found something particularly compromising when they hacked Google. Documents that spoiled a Chinese merger, key pieces of Google's search technology, or anything they had to report as stolen to the DoD because of export restrictions.
The biggest FAIL I've read about in this whole story is that Google was hacked because its userbase was still using IE6 as an active browser. THEY MAKE CHROME FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! I would have thought their mandate would be "Use Chrome or get fired." Of course, unless their one of those companies using some flavour of software that simply requires IE6 to run properly. Then they just fall into the category of "Why didn't you use Chrome when surfing MyFace and SpaceBook at work???"
Fail to Google and M$ IE6
"i mean to piss off google so quickly and so much i cant help but wonder what it was"
Google is not homogenous -- they were both getting flack from outside for entering into China (and going along with the censorship regime) to begin with, and also from what I've read there was strong dissent *inside* Google about entering the Chinese market for the same reasons. This hacking incident, I don't think that alone was it, but I think being in China was already unpopular within the company, and it was "the straw that broke the camels back".