I don't think Schmidt is a douche. I think he's just providing a balanced perspective. I suspect that Larry and Serge would run Google as a charity, if they could. Unfortunately, data centers are expensive as hell. Schmidt is just keeping the balance necessary to sustain Google.
Ok, but Schmidt's decision about China was a miscalculation, let's admit it. It brought a lot of problems for Google, and didn't bring them that much money. They weren't that much profitable there, despite quite a large market share.
There are 1.3 billion people in China. I don't think that any amount of miscalculations could have overcome that fact. It's also not that hard of a sell to say that "As long as we indicate that results were censored, we're doing what we can to bring information freedom to China one step at a time."
I disagree. What Schmidt missed is that Google has had great adoption, not just because of a good product, but because of good will from the public. By acquiescing to China's demands, they lost good will. In the long run, if they took Schmidt's path and became another media outlet for the state, they would probably end up more like Microsoft than Google, losing a lot of good will and customers in the US/Euro.
Despite what anyone says, the US/Euro market is their primary market, and the one they should be primarily concerned with keeping happy.
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I don't think Schmidt is a douche. I think he's just providing a balanced perspective. I suspect that Larry and Serge would run Google as a charity, if they could. Unfortunately, data centers are expensive as hell. Schmidt is just keeping the balance necessary to sustain Google.
Ok, but Schmidt's decision about China was a miscalculation, let's admit it. It brought a lot of problems for Google, and didn't bring them that much money. They weren't that much profitable there, despite quite a large market share.
There are 1.3 billion people in China. I don't think that any amount of miscalculations could have overcome that fact. It's also not that hard of a sell to say that "As long as we indicate that results were censored, we're doing what we can to bring information freedom to China one step at a time."
I disagree. What Schmidt missed is that Google has had great adoption, not just because of a good product, but because of good will from the public. By acquiescing to China's demands, they lost good will. In the long run, if they took Schmidt's path and became another media outlet for the state, they would probably end up more like Microsoft than Google, losing a lot of good will and customers in the US/Euro.
Despite what anyone says, the US/Euro market is their primary market, and the one they should be primarily concerned with keeping happy.