Many former Google China employees lament Google's diminished status in the country.
"What we hoped to accomplish with Google China is now being realized by Weibo, " proving that "engagement is the right approach, " said former Google China chief Kai-Fu Lee, who left the company in 2009.
The former president of Google China saw many of his engineers from the search engine move on to form startups and he became convinced that serial entrepreneurs were a good bet to back.
They include Apple, Baidu (the Google of China) EMC, Oracle, Juniper, Amazon and QualComm.
When Google quit China, it left local search market to rival Baidu.
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This is what Apple has done to Google by choosing China as the best venue in its challenge to Google Maps.
Facebook has not entered China while Baidu competed with Google for several years in China.
That's down from about 700 employees in 2009, according to a former Google executive in China.
While Apple is having to apologize for the poor quality of its maps in the West, it is clearly superior to Google Maps in China.
Microsoft will continue to complain because playing dirty pool is in their corporate DNA. Google has made some stupid mistakes in the last few years (being in China, Google Buzz, poor explanation of capturing WiFi packets, etc.), but compared to Microsoft, they are far better for the consumer in this dimension since Microsoft will do anything and everything to have their way.
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They analyze the development of Google or Apple in China very differently from how I do.
Several months later, however, China renewed Google's license to operate a website in the country.
Instead of shuttering its operations in China, Google plans to continue operating there.
Amazon has become the first Western technology firm to offer paid-for Android apps in China - beating Google to the lucrative market.
Competing with local clones has proved tough even for powerhouses like Google and eBay, and China's social networking space is especially crowded.
Overall, Google's revenue in China rose in last year, compared with 2010, Mr. Alegre said, though he declined to go into specifics.
The company on Monday also launched a dashboard page, which it promises to update regularly each day, that will show which Google services are available in China.
What do these have in common: Google, Blind Date, China, India, Wi-Fi and (just to throw a curve) Max Oshman, the 17-year-old Web designer I wrote about in the last issue?
Google's share of China's Web-search market fell to 17.2% in the third quarter of 2011 from 36% in the fourth quarter of 2009, largely to the benefit of rival Baidu Inc.
Now, with Android's growth in China and with more Chinese companies looking to advertise online, Google's decision to reverse course and invest more in China is a "pragmatic" one, said Mr. Alegre.
Western companies such as eBay, Yahoo, and Google have suffered painful defeats in China.
Tsinghua: Will China have corporations like Google or Apple that are highly creative?
The researchers identify several "internet ecosystems" that will try to tie users in to their customised part of the internet, among them Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Baidu and Tencent in China and Yandex in Russia.
Non-Google app stores that currently run on China-based Android devices filter out apps that violate Chinese regulations.
With Google fading from the search picture in China, it leaves further room for Baidu to establish a strangle-hold on market share.
Now that Google's license to operate in China has been renewed, the investment bank expects some advertisers to return to the world's largest search engine.
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