Sinomania!

Ten flower bouquets were pretentiously laid outside Google's headquarters in Beijing one per each million or so residents of the Chinese capital. The flowers are an apt metaphor for Google's market share in China. At the insistence of co-founder Sergey Brin Google is quitting China and wants a messy exit to hide its inability to build successful brand and business in the world's number 1 Internet and cell phone market. This move will mark the end of Google's seemingly unstoppable trajectory. Like Yahoo!, Ebay, and other web businesses before it Google will discover that while the USA may have created the Internet and still runs much of it (backbone, ICANN, etc.) it does not control it nor have a monopoly on its commercial applications.

Google cannot remain viable just delivering ads to eyeballs based on an outdated Internet business model. The future is in smartphones and new devices linking people directly to video, music, texts, independent of search engines. Even websites (god forbid!) are endangered.

Sergey Brin is a hypocrite. Google censors all over the world at the pleasure of governments from Germany to the USA targeting sex offenders, neo-Nazis, wannabe terrorists or "dissidents" that want to overthrow their own governments.

Mainstream media genuflects for Google with story after story about Google's brave stand not once revealing the fact that Google has three current executive employees in White House positions or that Google was the Obama campaign's number 3 contributer. The editiorial line shared by Anglo-American newspaper and media giants (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, London tabloids, etc.) says China is becoming "isolationist" and that the business world is abandoning China. This is deliberate misinformation and complete nonsense.

Just this week the Chairmans, Presidents, or senior executives of the following companies were all in Beijing: Caterpillar, Morgan Stanley, Bosch, Nomura, Nokia, Unilever, Bombardier, JP Morgan/Chase, Novartis, Sybase, Ford, ADB, McKinsey & Co., Michelin, Toshiba, Royal Dutch/Shell, Danone, Dupont, Amway, Total, Rio Tinto, BP, Dow Chemical. And that was at just one meeting....

See my earlier post "Google Hijacks US China Policy."

[Disclaimer: the author owns shares of Google via a mutual fund.]

Labels: business news, foreign investment, hypocrisy, hypocrite