Introduction
Baidu is a Chinese web services company that mainly offers Chinese language search engine for websites, music and images. Baidu also offers other services such as Baidu Baike which is similar to Wikipedia, Baidu Maps, etc. Baidu was founded in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu and now the company’s headquarters is located in Beijing.
Portfolio 1
1. Why is Baidu number one in its industry? Where is its competitive advantage?
As a Chinese search engine provider, Baidu is almost unrivaled compared to its competitors such as 360 search, Sogou search, Google China, Yahoo China.
As can be seen at Figure 1, Baidu owns 85.9% of the Chinese Search Engine Market Share. Even the world’s leading search engine provider Google could not compete with Baidu in the Chinese market. Especially during the attempt of cyber attack on Google at 2010 (Yousuf, 2010) to access Gmail accounts of Chinese human right activists, which has led Google to decide that they would no longer censor results on google.cn such as pornography or references to topics such as the Taiwanese independence, the Dalai Lama and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and redirect all the searches to a Google Hong Kong. This allowed Google to avoid the strict censorship rules that Baidu and others in China must follow, while also putting it at a major disadvantage in the huge Chinese market (Einhorn & Stone, 2010). Moreover in 2012 when the Chinese
The economy in China is doing well. China has in its recent years reached financial stability. This is due to the fact that there is a high level of domestic demand. Because of this, many companies around the world begin to invest in the Chinese market. China is also one of the fastest growing when it comes to Information Technology and has been able to attract companies such as Google and even Microsoft. It has been forecasted that the Internet industry in China is expected to increase at a rate of about ten percent within the next five years. This is great news because Google will be able to benefit.
In the book 1984, the government has control over all media “and so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain” (Orwell 37). Due to the party’s restraint of all media, there are no actual certainty of written records. Without written records, no one knows if the government is being truthful about what has happened in the past. The citizens even question their memories and logic because there is no certainty of the past. Without records, the government can rearrange history however they please because there is no evidence to prove they are wrong. Similarly, in the article, “The Other Side Of the Great Firewall”, China has set up an immense system of “online censorship, commonly known as the Great Firewall, [which] blocks the populace from viewing material deemed dangerous to the state” (Beech etal 2). The chinese government has blocked the chinese citizens from being able to go on a variety of websites in order to protect China from western influences. Without certain websites, the government can regulate what their citizens can see and can hide what they don’t want their citizens to see. The citizens are being blocked from information that is considered dangerous to their government. The government continually will have total jurisdiction through the use of blocking websites
Censorship in China has gained much attention recently because of the conflict between Google and the Chinese government’s self-censorship policies. In fact, censorship has been practiced since ancient China and the intensity only increases by the years. Nowadays, the most notable measure of censorship is being done on the Internet. More and more restrictions have been put into actions by the Chinese government, which make the life of Chinese Internet users, the Chinese netizens, very inconvenient. With the intensity of censorship increasing and the censoring technology improving, Internet censorship has mainly negative effects on Chinese society.
The Chinese government had enforced these rules and regulations through blocking, filtering and shutting down Internet cafes. According to Amnesty International, the Chinese government routinely blocks news sites, especially those with dissident views or banned groups. Anniversary’s such as the 1989 pro-democracy protests are heavily guarded days that see increase Internet blocking. Internet blocking of major search gateways is also
The Freedom of Speech is granted to every American citizen and has been since it was founded in 1776; however, not every nation grants that right. China, as a communist nation, retains most individual freedom rights from its citizens. Although in the Peoples Republic of China’s (PRC) 1982 constitution, people are guaranteed Freedom of Expression and Press; it is often violated by the current corrupt government. The government demands the news to be 80% positive and 20% negative, altering the facts n occasion. In contrast to that, America has recently become more involved with the pressing issue as well because of the involvement of Google. Thus it has shined the light on government censorship and corruption. China’s government corruption
Corporations that move into China have long recognized that internet censorship is a fact of life. In 2006,
Google entered China in 2006 with high hopes of taking over the Chinese internet market. In order to become a major player for internet search engines in China, however, they had buckled and filtered search results according to the Chinese government. When Google.cn was launched, a loud public outcry over its giving in to the Chinese government on censoring and filtering search engine results, the company faced a communications crisis. Since Google had always been known for its free thinking, this seemed a vast contradiction. From a communications standpoint, Google’s greatest vulnerability in this crisis lay with a tarnished public image.
This issue is very concerning for all of China because the government will not allow any opposition to itself. The government is not moderated and therefore has indefinite power. There is nothing to stand in the way of the government doing whatever they want. There are 420,000,000 Internet users in China. That is more than the entire population of the United States. Also, recently there have been some rally cries on the Internet in China that are similar to those of the Middle East/Egypt. China is becoming even stricter on the Internet usage policies because they do not want what happened in Egypt to spread to China. The government has also said that if any reporters come to the supposed rally sites they will either be deported or arrested and sent to jail.
Baidu adopted a strategy that focuses on searches in Chinese. The company has an advantage on this as the team understood the Chinese language, culture and the operations as opposed to other overseas competitors.
In current, Google is the one of the most public companies in the world. Google is an American multinational technology corporation that is specialized in Internet-related services as well as products. For case, software, online advertising technologies, cloud computing, search engine, etc. are the major products and services of Google (Google Inc. 2015). In addition to this, there are numerous competitor of Google Inc. For example, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, etc. are the major competitors of Google.
Censorship is the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security. There are good reasons why censorship is used, such as some information might have to be censored for the content it might display and which in turn might cause a disturbance in peace. Countries try not abuse the fact they are allowed to do this because they are the ones who create the rules. However, China is abusing this fact and has been doing it to the point people are fearing what they can post or use on the internet. This issue was brought up in recent years because it has many different types of medians that were found in the New York Times. Firstly, the discussion
If this is not possible due to legal laws Google acknowledged that it may leave China and close its Chinese offices. Google said it was reviewing its business in China. On the same day, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a brief statement condemning the attacks.
Google is one of the most successful corporations that have ever been established. Through innovation, persistence, growth,
Interests: A population of 1.3 billion along with a growing economy makes Chinese market extremely important for Google to enter
Professionally, Google is known as a company based in California that is labeled as an internet company which is multi-national. It provides online searching, as well as cloud computing, software, and advertising. The company actually didn 't start off as a company, but rather as a research project back in 1996. The project was being conducted by Sergey Brin and Larry Page who at the time were studying at Standford University as PhD students. At the time, in internet-land, the search engines that existed operated where they ranked the results by counting the number of times keywords results were on a page. The two students came with a better idea (called PageRank at the time), that looked at relationship between websites. It would rank websites by determining it 's relevance, which was based on the importance of pages, and the number of pages, and how it linked back to the main website. After the idea 's creation, the two founders made the project into a business, and changed the name to "Google", which is a neat miss-spelling of the word "googol" which had significance because it stands for the number one followed by one hundred zeros, and it related to their goal because they wanted to create a search engine that offered a large quantity of information.