Dotting the roads of Cupertino, Google might seem to be ubiquitous and omnipotent. However, Silicon Valley’s largest company seems to be lagging behind in other countries. Kai-Fu Lee, who is in charge of the Google’s operations in China, has left to form his own company.
From our Silicon Valley perspective, we might view Lee’s resignation as negligible. Google, after all, has millions of employees and has control over the internet and maybe even our lives. (There’s that search history and that sneaky immortal cookie that they put on our hard drive.) Nevertheless, Google addicts like me “Google” all needed information, collaborate via Google Docs, and communicate with G-chat. And most Silicon Valley-ers live on Google. In our technological bubble, we might mistakenly assume that the rest of the world uses Google as much as we do.
In China, our Google is their Baidu, and their QQ is our MSN chat. So what has Lee done to make Google rise above the morass of tech companies in China? He released Google.cn, Google’s Chinese-language search engine, and hired the best engineers and scientists to keep it up and running. Interestingly, after all this work, Google’s search results are often linked to Baidu’s forums.
Google ambitions in China have taken a blow with Kai Fu Lee’s leave, and the company is replacing him with two top executives. But will they be able to maneuver the company as well as Lee?
They should probably change Google’s Chinese name, which means music of grain and is pronounced “Goo- Guh”. What kind of music is “Goo-guh”, anyway?
