I wonder how much a publicly traded company could act upon their values, as opposed to the primary value of seeking value for shareholders. For instance, if an Apple or Amazon takes a stand and ends up having to pull out of China, would that be grounds for a shareholder lawsuit?
Google wasn't giving up too much in China. The search engine wasn't getting much tractions, based on differing asthetics.
Chinese websites are far more clustered and busy - take a look at https://world.taobao.com/. I guess that it's being shifted - baidu seems relatively uncluttered, but the Chinese aesthetic is cramming as much information as possible on the same web page.
Still, Google China's share of the market was not negligible. The article above claimed it had only just dipped under 30%; StatCounter (accurately or not) claims Google China was still above 40% in early 2010: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/ch...
Either way, that's a significant fraction, more than Bing has ever had in the US. Not to mention the size of the Chinese market or future growth potential (consider what Google could have done with Android in China).
Google could have responded to the pressure by seeking to appease the Chinese government. Other companies have done so, many profitably. Google did not.
for that 30% claimed market share, a large % of them had to search "google" in Baidu to get to google.com because they didn't know how to spell the word google.
>but the Chinese aesthetic is cramming as much information as possible on the same web page
I suspect that the language just simply looks busy to people who aren't fluent/native, even if you know enough to actually read it. I had the same complaint in Japan, even though I could read most of it. At the same time, even in English, a large complaint on here is that most redesigns simply result in a dumbed down design with less information density.
No, it's a completely different design aesthetic. If anything, Japanese / Chinese websites should be less cluttered because the characters can potentially convey more in lesser space. Not everything is cultural relativism.
Shareholder lawsuits are among the least worrisome for a public corporation. They happen frequently. They very, very rarely end up adding up to anything that matters.
Why is that? There's an extraordinarily high bar to jump over if you're a shareholder and you want to sue and win, when it comes to showing damages from a corporation's decisions. I should emphasize it again: the bar is extraordinarily high.
It's so high, it's difficult for shareholder lawsuits to prevail against companies like Valeant Pharmaceuticals.
