Recommendations for Closing the Gap Between Google and China

Recommendations for Closing the Gap between Google and China

I am sending this memorandum out so that we can look back and reflect from a constructive point of view of how we as a company, could have handled our entering of the Chinese market differently, so that it could have been equally beneficial for both us and China.

Problem:

We were founded under the principle, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The moment we decided to compromise our mission is where things made a turn for the worse with our expansion in China. The Great Firewall of China turned out to be not so great and actually backfired on us. We acted like the majority of every other large corporation that faces setbacks when expanding internationally in China. Here’s what we should have done differently:

Recommendations:

• We should have studied China as an independent culture. To be successful in China, you have to be in-sync with the way their local culture operates.

• Instead of forcing our services that maintained our own core values on China, we should have figured out China’s values and missions first and then created a search engine that’s tailored to their individual cultures and not just ours. This seems to have been the main issue for our attempted expansion into China anyway.

• Figure out a way to get the Chinese government to reach a compromise or get on our side, as they appeared to be one of the biggest threats to our success in China. If we could have found a way to reach an agreement with Chinese government, we could have accomplished our main goal of gaining full market share and outpacing Baidu.

• Since China’s market was so lucrative, we should have done everything we possibly could to do things the