Googled
'I think that in the long term, they are going to have to open.'
I worry that Sergey Brin (his words above), Google and the foreign press are assessing China's behavior through the lens of their own culture.
China thinks in 100 years - not minutes, hours, days or months. It's a culture of patience. To me, people's frustrations with the ways of China can best be described as beautifully naïve.
There are plenty of articles today on Google's pull out of China - redirecting traffic to Hong Kong. Here are a couple I would recommend reading http://bit.ly/bxuwv3 and http://nyti.ms/beaNLT
Google may only have (had) 33% share of the search market in China but search is growing at 40% a year. The country has nearly 400 million web users.
There will be little in the way of strong analyst journalism in this story because quite frankly, the city's not going to care too much. China is predicted to only represent about 1% to 2% of Google's income.
So another American company struggles to understand China and loses because of it. As I write this, according to reports China is now blocking access to Google HK for mainland Chinese. No surprise there.
What does surprise me is the lack of cultural assimilation by smart companies and therefore the lack of patience that comes with understanding the territory. Google should be looking to achieve its desire of openness in China 100 years from now. Being out of China is not going to make that goal any easier.
