Google in China Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Introduction

Google Inc. was launched by two university fellows, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who met each other at Stanford University during 1995, and during the next year they launched their search engine in the United States and named it BackRub. Later on in 1998, when they received a cheque of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, then changed the name of their search engine to its current name Google. Further, during 2000, Google Inc. launched a self-service Ad program, AdWords that enabled the companies to advertise and monitor their advertisement campaigns as per their own requirement from time to time. Further, in four years’ time, Google launched another feature for sending and receiving emails through Google’s service and Google named in Gmail (Percy, 2014). However, within six years of its launch, Google offered its shares to the general public which proved to be a huge success of the Google in order to raise capital that was needed to support the expansion of its operations. Meanwhile, Google kept on growing internally and through organic growth and in 2006 it acquired YouTube, which was a well-known site for online sharing of videos. Meanwhile, Google Inc. generated its revenues from the excellent features and services such as AdWords, Gmail and a video sharing website YouTube (Erik Hjelmvik, 2014).

Google’s search engine is ranked as a top search engine in the United States and as per the results of ComScore Google’s current share of the United States market is 67.6% as of April 2014.Meanwhile, during the same period, Google has 88.21% of global market share which is well above other search engines. Further, Google currently exists in more than 40 countries through its more than 70 offices in different countries. However, Google has maintained its global offices, according to the local culture of the region and with some standard structure (Vernet, 2014).

However, the Google search engine soon became a powerful tool that provided users with various experiences of searching; furthermore, Google Inc. is capable enough to identify the user location and then serve the location specific search results and by provide local language based interface. However, the Google’s launch of google.cn is ill-perceived by the Chinese as foreign search engine’s attempt at trying to control the chinese internet market. Meanwhile, Google started experiencing that its traffic has reduced from within the China and the functions of its website were not giving efficient results. Google later finds out that the access to its website is being restricted by the Chinese firewall, known as the Great Firewall of China. As the search results and search methodology of Google Inc. is conflicting with the Chinese government’s regulations which led to this restricted access (Dan, 2014).

Meanwhile, Google, realized that the only way to tackle the situation in China is through establishing an appropriate search engine which is specifically, developed for China and which incorporates search filters and censorship policies that are required by the Chinese government. Hence, Google launches google.cn, a search engine which is specifically designed and developed for Chinese internet users. However, despite the launch of country specific internet search engine Google.cn; it is still not sufficiently compliant enough according to Chinese Government and the government still requires severe censorship, which Google is refusing to incorporate. Google also has been attacked by the cyber hackers in 2010 through hacking its Gmail services and hacked email accounts of different regions’ human rights activists. Hence, all of these factors are propelling Google to abandon of its search services in China (Percy, 2014).

Current Situation

Global Network Initiative (GNI)

Google Inc. had joined the Global Network Initiative (GNI) and had been following the code of conduct developed by GNI in order to handle the consumer information and enquiries of government authorities for the provision of customer data. However, Google Inc. has passed the test conducted by GNI that is conducted in order to establish that whether the companies, who have joined GNI, complied with the code of conduct or not. Google passed this test and proved that it has been following the code of conduct. Further, the code of conduct is aimed to protect the consumer interest by not disclosing users’ private information to the government and other law and security agencies, who require access to this information for the protection of national interess. The test was based on selected situations where the members of GNI were connected to the provision of customer information and respond to each situation by the GNI member companies (Vernet, 2014).....................

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Description of the circumstances related to the introduction www.google.cn. In order to comply with the Chinese government, the results of Google.cn Internet censorship. This seems to contradict the stated philosophy and Google's mission to organize and provide access to information in the world. Public response occurs and Google is forced to defend their controversial decision. Presents both sides of the debate and asks students to consider what they feel is right. "Hide
by Deborah Compeau, Prahar Shah Source: Richard Ivey School of Business Foundation 9 pages. Publication Date: 01 May 2007. Prod. #: 906E19-PDF-ENG