I don't know if this was meant to be a puff piece or not -- there's not a lot of sources outside Google. Hard to say if that was by design or not.
In either case, the story increased my admiration that Google is trying to do the right thing -- sometimes being tremendously naive, but still trying to live their motto. That was good to see.
The easy response to this is: you can't be just a little bit pregnant, that is, either you are a search gateway to the rest of the internet -- all of the internet -- or you are being controlled by other forces. It was sad to watch all the "free" companies in the west roll over when asked to censor. I'm glad this theme is getting more attention.
This article is just an excerpt from Steven Levy's book and it cuts out before it gets to Google's current situation in China. After these events, they redirected users from their Chinese domain name to their Hong Kong servers in order to sidestep the censorship requirements.
This situation didn't last very long, however, and China threatened to withdraw Google's license for their Chinese website if they continued redirecting users automatically. When this happened in June last year, Google restored the censorship on google.cn, just leaving a link for customers to get to google.co.hk for unfiltered results.
More details about this can be found on Google's blog:
They didn't restore the censorship on google.cn... Instead, right now google.cn is just a landing page linking to www.google.com.hk so it's just basically the same as a redirect, the user just needs to click on the link instead of being sent there automatically...
yeah, that was a weird conclusion...it says right there in the linked blog post
"instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page."
I admire Google, but as a China-based technologist with years in Beijing it has been clear to everyone I know for a long time that Google China was an organizational and strategic disaster.
Levy paints this as a political problem. But really it is an organizational one. The decision to hire Kai Fu Lee was a lurching move made impetuously from the top. And when they pulled out it was a lurching move made impetuously from the top.
The biggest challenge for Google China was never improving Google's core algorithms and services (that stuff was sensibly walled off). It was justifying long-term involvement in China. But Google China didn't innovate. It didn't compete. And it failed to produce or champion a single project interesting or "non-evil" enough to persuade its disconnected Mountain View overlords that a public dust-up with the CCP might be a bad thing.
Google's IME (input method editor) for Chinese characters was the first of its kind. It's been cloned by Chinese businesses, and it had its initial teething problems re the data problem, but I still use it when on the web from Windows.
Perfect example. The Google IME was nowhere near the first of its kind; it just became popular with non-native speakers because Google didn't cram in advertising like its Chinese predecessors and made it free. The algorithms involved are technically simple and the basic data structures are multigrams indexed as a binary tree or HMMs.
The fact that developers had to steal data to do it instead of rolling their own corpus is a perfect example of the sort of chronic failure I'm talking about. Another is the fact they licensed Kingsoft materials (built off Linguistic Data Consortium data) instead of developing their own. Why outsource data development when you can hire people for under $2k per month to just do it for you?
The English language media typically focuses on Google's genuine political problems because it wants to use the company as an indicator for the state of US-China relations. So people slam Baidu (an innovative company!) as a copycat and no-one remarks on the way Google's behavior suggests no serious effort or willingness to tackle the non-trivial or data-intensive problems that crop up in the semantic analysis of Chinese text. It is possible Google was doing really innovative stuff that I haven't heard about, but the fact that Mountain View made the decision to pull out of the country without even informing its China office is yet another data point suggesting the China office wasn't doing anything terribly worthwhile. Google shut house the way you'd fire an unproductive staff member.
At a minimum, this lack of execution and/or attention to competing through innovation is embarrassing. Not for the main office which is focusing on language agnostic technologies. But it is bad for Google China and I would even go so far as to call it borderline incompetent. You can bet the parent company is heavily invested in semantic search in English, and Chinese is arguably a more important language for text analysis and retrieval in the 21st century.
I'm kind of disturbed by the kind of cultural misunderstandings that are going on here. Bribes are one thing. Gifts are another. An iPod is cheap change. How much do you want to bet those officials didn't have one already?
When I was a child, my mother would give gifts to everyone from my piano teacher to the doctor's receptionist. We would do well to be able to distinguish between bribes and gifts.
I think facebook has learned something from this as they prepare to push into China. Looks like they are going to partner with Baidu on the initiative. Whether that's a good idea or not remains to be seen.
>After the employee's departure, Google chose a three-person government relations team, all female, led by Julie Zhu, an energetic woman in her thirties.
am i the only one who thinks that such approach have no chances to work in China, Russia, India, etc,...?
I doubt that you need a dedicated "government relations team" in countries other than China.
As for ordinary public relations, in Russia they are executed by women more often than not. Editor-in-chief of Yandex, VP of marketing in Mail.ru, Director of PR of Google Russia are all women. I fail to understand why would you think this might be a problem.
>I doubt that you need a dedicated "government relations team" in countries other than China.
yep. A bunch of engineers got together and certified all these MS products with Russian Federal government on pure technical merits. Have you checked the place of Russia on the world corruption list?
The China actually is listed as "cleaner" than Russia corruption-wise. And politically - well, Russia doesn't censor Tiananmen square, so on this one specific point Russia may be scoring a bit better :)
>As for ordinary public relations, in Russia they are executed by women more often than not.
So, you don't see any difference between governmental and public relations in Russia? You aren't kidding, right?
>If you can't figure it out we'd assume there is none.
how do you think i'm suppose to know who, for example, talks there with FSB about providing (or refusing to provide - as if somebody is able to refuse - and what consequences it will cause for the business :) with the access to the email boxes, searches, search requests' and forum posts' IPs and other information ? Obviously it is a serious behind-the-closed-doors business what isn't done by a girl from PR. The fact that i don't know who this person(s) is has no bearing on the fact of their existence.
I'm not good at conspirology, sorry. Not going to debate it.
Facts so far:
Google.cn's government relations were a team of three ladies, which was a public fact.
This configuration is presumed to be suboptimal in china.
You could not figure out who does government relations for leading Russian internet companies.
Their public relations are largely done by women, and this is natural for Russia and doesn't seem to cause trouble.
You have asserted that there was a problem arising from the fact that google.cn's government relations team was all-woman.
And then you have asserted that Russia would share that property.
You didn't back your latter statement with any facts, so I would like to hear some.
If you sort of "just know" that, then I would symmetrically declare that I "just know" the opposite and I don't see how it would progress from there.
>You have asserted that there was a problem arising from the fact that google.cn's government relations team was all-woman. And then you have asserted that Russia would share that property.
yes, if you look at my original posts, it is my personal opinion. It is based on my experience living the first 30 years of my life in Russia, ie. "just know".
>You didn't back your latter statement with any facts, so I would like to hear some.
I wonder what facts you imagine can be used to back such statement.
>then I would symmetrically declare that I "just know" the opposite
and i'm pretty surprised that you may "just know" the opposite. Have you been/ are you living in Russia?
>and I don't see how it would progress from there.
There is no chance of progress here. It is one of the reasons i left the country (please spare the propaganda that thing have changed during last 10 years - it isn't always working even for people who live there permanently)
Sorry, but I have another experience of living in Russia for 26 years. I doubt that those four years of difference would make your opinion much more credible than mine.
Moreover, I work at one of largest Internet firms (no any management, but still) and your assertions just don't "click" with my experience.
I imagine that you could show that Internet companies working in Russia indeed have government relations teams and those tend to be mostly-male; but that's not only thing I can imagine. The problem is that you supplied none.
Another thing is that I assume you've never been to China and India, which doesn't prevent you from spreading spontaneous knowledge AKA stereotypes about those countries.
Both of those countries (as I can tell) are huge and extremelly diverse, so, for example, one's stereotypes of Chinese village would hardly apply to Chinese megapolis.
And to be fair, I find unbacked stereotypes being repeated over and over to be a bad thing - a kind of background noise that can drown actual signal (input from people who've been there and done that).
>I doubt that those four years of difference would make your opinion much more credible than mine.
1. Putin's Russia is pretty much the only Russia you had chance to see and critically analyze (not that you've actually used that chance though :)
2.as one smart man said "change of point of view worth additional 80 IQ points". You don't have multi-year experience of living in the society which has achieved significant advances on the issue of equal rights for women, so you just can't benchmark Russian society against it. Wrt. India or China - well, may i venture a guess that you didn't talk informally on numerous occasions through the years with Chinese or Indians about their countries?
>And to be fair, I find unbacked stereotypes being repeated over and over to be a bad thing - a kind of background noise that can drown actual signal (input from people who've been there and done that).
If not for my "unbacked stereotypes", your opinion wrt. Russia, for example, would supposedly be the "actual signal" as you're presenting yourself as "been there and done that" where is your experience of Russia, inside and outside, lacks significantly compare to my as i explained above.
How do you know that I don't have bla-bla-bla experience? Two comments ago you couldn't even infer the (obvious from context) fact that I have experience living in Russia.
Anyway, I'm done with you unless you start providing either some facts or some deep analysis instead of machine-gun-firing stereotypes.
the point isn't about "lesser". It is about ability to communicate effectively and get things done with a government bureaucrat operating in the male chauvinistic environment. The phrases downstream in the article describe completely expected situation:
>Zhu was better able to communicate with Mountain View. But she had her hands full fending off Chinese government directives.
So they effectively improved interface to Google HQ instead of the interface to the government. That's very typical of western companies still learning how to operate outside of the Western culture.
If a China citizen has access to the Google filter results services and does not use it to filter unacceptable stuff and thus is punishable under China's censor laws does that not now satisfy the China Party elite as far as following China censor laws?
In Google's view they could tell the Chinese government that they put the best person in charge of filtering results the Chinese user..
Even if it were the case, you can't argue around China's policies with legalese. They have much more free reign to do what they want than other governments.
In either case, the story increased my admiration that Google is trying to do the right thing -- sometimes being tremendously naive, but still trying to live their motto. That was good to see.
The easy response to this is: you can't be just a little bit pregnant, that is, either you are a search gateway to the rest of the internet -- all of the internet -- or you are being controlled by other forces. It was sad to watch all the "free" companies in the west roll over when asked to censor. I'm glad this theme is getting more attention.