Google Inc in China - Term Paper Example

? Google Inc. In China Table of Contents I.The Pre-Analysis 3 II. The Situation 3 III. Analysis 4 A.Situational Analysis: 4 B.Organizational Analysis: 8 C. Societal analysis: 10 IV. The questions for the key issues in the case study 10 V. The Analyst Position 10 e.Bibliography 12 I. The Pre-Analysis A. Perspective 1. Author’s perspective: ¶The perspective of the author is that Google Inc. in China faced ethical, legal and cultural challenges. The corporate motto of the company “Don’t be evil’ presented conflict for the company’s existence in China. However, the company took a considerable time and effort in order to understand how its search technology could work effectively in China and thus made adjustments accordingly. The author has the perspective that even though the company appeased censors in China, but it maintained the personal information associated with the web blogs and emails outside the Chinese territory, which was different strategy of the company in comparison to its competitors. However, it might create the bias as it is better to provide access to information to users rather than make them completely devoid. 2. My Perspective : ¶ The knowledge of the motto of the motto of Google Inc. ‘not to be evil’ and the mission of the company which is to organize the information of the world and make it universally useful and accessible is violated in terms of the decision of the company to comply with the filtering regulations of Chinese authorities. The possible bias from the author’s perspective could be overlooking the motto of the company to gain a market share in the growing market of China by compromising with the ethical perspective of freedom of expression. B. Bracketing: ¶ ‘Previously acquired information about the corporate image of the company and how it is superior to its competitors in terms of putting user benefits first.’ This previous information is set for bracketing so as not affect the analysis. II. The Situation A. Facts: ¶ Informal corporate motto of Google ‘don’t be evil’. 2002: Blocking of google.com and very slow speed of the search engine due to non-compliance with Chinese censorship laws. 2006: China’s attempt to move away from the communist model and declaring its commitment to outside reforms and Google’s initiative to look more at its global strategy. Establishment of strong surveillance system by Chinese government. Making the internet service providers in China comply with censorship rules for getting license. Offering google.cn, a local version that complied with censorship issues Criticism worldwide for giving in to the bullying of the Chinese government. B. Historical context: ¶ 2001: China joined WTO abolishing market impediments and giving positive signals to the world. 2004: IPO by Google leading the shareholders to have a more say in activities of the company. Governmental and self censorship by the Chinese authorities for internet service providers in China. Google’s non compliance with censorship laws in 2000 that made the website shut down for 2 weeks in 2002. Announcement of launching google.cn that complied with censorship laws. C. Quotations: ¶ “While many companies claim to put their customers first, few are able to resist the temptation to make small sacrifices to increase shareholder value. Google has steadfastly refused to make any change that does not offer a benefit to the users who come to the site” (Martin 5). This shows bias of the author he mentions the previous conduct of the company to relate to presented case scenario. III. Analysis A. Situational Analysis: 1. ¶ Key principal parties involved in the case are Google Inc. Director of International Business, Tom Mclean, and Chinese authorities. McLean headed the development of Chinese version of its search engine in order to cater to the needs of its users in China by first developing the US based technology wherein it did not require complying with scrutiny and internet filtering regulations of the Chinese authorities regarding displaying of search results for sensitive content. However, it later developed google.cn which complied with all the regulations of the Chinese authorities and provided filtered information. The second party is Chinese authorities which do not welcome the vast and the uncensored information over internet, thus implementing various conduct rules for flow of information over internet. It monitors and limits the online information available to its users. 2. ¶ Mclean handled the conflict in the case by providing as much unfiltered information to its Chinese users as possible by first providing them with google.com Chinese version, but as it faced conflict with the Chinese authorities, the director made decisions agreeing to the monitoring and scrutiny of the internet content brought upon by the Chinese government. In order to resolve the conflict between the ethos of the company and self-censorship proposed by the Chinese government, the director took the decision of developing a Chinese search engine that is complete with the censored search results but maintaining the personal information of its users on emails and web bloggers outside the territory of China as well as outside the jurisdiction of the authorities of China (Martin 13). The Chinese government tried to resolve the conflict between its policy of keeping the protests nonexistent and the sensitive issues out of the coverage of the general people, by increasing the surveillance over the internet and allowing the internet service providers to adopt the practice of self censorship in which they themselves censor and screen the foreign information traffic. 3. ¶The constraints on Google Inc. regarding the decision of providing free, expressed and unbiased search results for Chinese users were lawsuits of China and the ethical constraints. The law of China allowed only those internet providers to carry on their services in the Chinese territory which comply with the surveillance and monitoring system of the Chinese authorities. The operation of the search engine technology in the territory was not possible without complying with the laws of the country; no matter they are in violence of the corporate motto of any company or its code of conduct. This put a constraint on Google Inc. to provide free and fully uncensored information to its users in China. Another constraint was faced by the company in terms of its ethical compliances. Googlers are known to have excellence business conduct and making the information available universally (Martin 4). It had to fulfill the needs and requirements of the Chinese market along-with fulfilling its mission of providing universal access but at the same time comply with Chinese laws. 4. ¶The chance events in form of fortune or fate played a role in the decision of launching google.cn in China in 2005 and its outcome of high criticism and public scrutiny thereafter. In 2004, the company launched its first IPO and appeared on NASDAQ. Its first IPO was a big success and it allowed the stakeholders to have a more say in the decisions of the company (Martin 3). Followed by this event, in 2005, the company made the decision of launching google.cn that conformed to the Chinese rules. It led to more criticizing and public scrutiny as the company change from private to public company. This event was beyond the control of Google Inc. Moreover, the growing competition from Yahoo and Microsoft made the company think upon taking the decision to grab the growing market of China as Yahoo had already set its operations in the country making Google Inc. take the crucial decision of launching the Chinese Google technology. The growing competition was beyond the control of the company. 5. ¶ The Chinese authorities and the Google Inc. had differing values that affected their decisions and corresponding steps taken. The Chinese government believes in keeping the dissent and disagreement at their minimum and at the same time keeping the protests nonexistent. The authorities feel that travelling of more and more uncensored information regarding sensitive political and other domestic issues can send negative feeling among its citizens. This value has led the Chinese authorities to develop a sophisticated surveillance system to monitor and filter the sensitive content (Martin 7). On the other hand, Google Inc. values giving the best experience to its users and do not take any kind of decisions or deals that have no value to the users of the search engine. Moreover, the company values the organizing the information of the world and making it more accessible and useful for its customers. It strives towards ethical business conduct and doing good things for the world that motivated it to launch its search engine in China so as to make users there accessible to the information, and moreover, it displayed the list of filtered results unlike other search engines that did not notify the users about the filtered search results. 6. Biases: ¶ Availability heuristic: Google Inc. overestimated the likelihood of events. Another bias is choice-supportive bias in which the company remembers its choices to be better. Google Inc. remembered to provide the services to the market rather than looking how it could affect its image in long-terms. Bias Blind Spot is another bias in which one seems oneself to be less biased than others, as Google Inc. considered that displaying notification to users for filtered results was better than not making them aware like what other players were doing. 7. ¶ The decisions made by Google Inc. to consider many stakeholders of its technology, it was able to create a balance between its goal of providing as much uncensored and unfiltered information as much possible, and the goal of the Chinese government to filter the search results and monitor the flow of the type of information on internet. However, it does not relate to building a sustainable organization as it has to compromise with its values and ethos in order to serve the people in China. Moreover, the censorship by Chinese authorities brought down its reliability among users. The users could compare the search results on both the versions of google.com and google.cn, but the speed of google.com in the Chinese territory was very slow due to Chinese surveillance system (Martin 13). 8. ¶An unexamined presupposition for Google Inc. in the decision of launching the google.cn in China which complied with Chinese laws was the ethical concern. The decision of the company to abide by the surveillance laws of the Chinese authorities could result into high public scrutiny considering whether it was a way for China to connect to the outside world or was it another way of giving in to the bullying of the government. This unexamined presupposition may have made Google Inc. to think of the outcome of the launch of censored search engine on the trust of internet users. B. Organizational Analysis: 1. a. ¶The actions under analysis, such as not offering applications, such as Gmail, blogger, Picasa were necessary for the company because it had to create a balance between its commitment to protect the identity of its users as well as comply with the censorship rules of the Chinese government. Moreover, the notification to the users regarding filtering of the information on every page of the search results was also necessary to notify their users about the filtered information so they do not remain ignorant and can check the search results on google.com. However, the actions decreased the reliability element of the service quality dimensions. b. ¶The actions taken decreased the efficacy of Google Inc. as many-a-times company faced the censorship issues with the authorities and complying with censorship damaged the image of the company among certain moral and ethical groups. The intended result for launch of google.cn in China was to capture the growing market of China, but it lost its significant market share that it gained at the early period of launch to the China’s indigenous search engine Baidu (Martin 13). 1. Risk: ¶The risk for the company was compromising with the censorship in order to cater to the users in China. a. ¶The risk was at the optimal level as the time when actions under analysis were taken as China offered a potential and large market for Google services and the launch of google.cn could help the company attain financial success at the cost of doing comprise in terms of abiding by the censorship rules of the company. Moreover, it could provide its services to Chinese users, and thus complying with goal of serving Chinese population. The risk of censorship was optimal as company took various steps unlike its competitors, like displaying the list of filtered information and does not offering services such as Gmail, blogger and Picasa so as to protect the identity of the users. b. ¶The risk was not at the optimal level following the actions under analysis. The risk was high following the actions. As the company faced a lot of criticism from academics, business leaders, activists and politicians for giving support to a country which has totalitarian regime and known for its human rights violations. This increased the risk of the company towards providing reliable information to its users, and reliability and trust of the overall internet users. The image of the company was getting damaged as it had to serve not only Chinese population but had to give answers to the world as well. 2. ¶ Operations-Quality Leadership, Stakeholder Management, Moral Leadership, and Environmental Leadership: a. ¶At the time of events discussed in the case study, the company was practicing the stakeholder management effectively by making the decision of entering the attractive and profitable market of China, thus ensuring that the shareholders would get a higher value for their shares in the company. Regarding the quality leadership, the company was not giving quality content to its users in China as users usually had issues with the time taken by the search engine to display results. There were gaps in standard design and service gaps. Due to the censorship issues with the government, the authorities blocked the site many times, thus irritating the users ultimately. The moral leadership was better than the other competitors of the company in China as it displayed the list of filtered content on every search page unlike the competitors, thus making the user aware of the filtration (Martin 14). However, on an overall basis, the company was compromising with its moral or environmental leadership by agreeing to the censorship. b. ¶The evidence for the judgment is not offering of Gmail, Blogger, Picasa and other services that could come under the scrutiny by Chinese censors putting the identity of the users at stake. The company avoided such risk, thus ensuring that the company was reliable, but regarding the quality content, the website of the company was very slow due to the issues of the type of content the company censored and what the authorities actually wanted, leaving the end user dissatisfied in the whole process (Martin 13). The company was not maintaining its moral leadership as the mission of the company says to organize and provide world information to users in a fully accessible and useful way. Moreover, the informal corporate motto of the company was ‘Don’t be evil’ which seem to be overlooked in case of China as it agreed to censorship rules. C. Societal analysis: ¶The decision of launching google.cn in China led to huge public scrutiny and criticism by various segments of the society. Many politicians, academics, human rights groups and business leaders for giving in to the bullying by a government that has totalitarian regime and has a record of violating human rights. Adhering to local laws and limiting the access to the internet content was also condemned by business leaders and groups that emphasize on ethics. They criticized the company to comprise their values and mission for financial gain. IV. The questions for the key issues in the case study ¶How can a company mitigate the ethically diverse impacts while conducting business in a country? How ethical it is to compromise with the values and corporate mission of the company in order to provide services to conflict creating markets? V. The Analyst Position ¶The analyst position: Google Inc. should have adhered to its values, standard and motto for which it is known all over the world. The issues for the company were how to comply with its own mission and values while following the local laws of China. As the company has the mission to provide universal access to the information, its decision to comply with the censorship and scrutiny laws of Chinese authorities was not ethically right as it limited the content for the users and puts a question mark on the freedom of expression. The facts such as, worldwide criticism by certain groups comprising that of ethical standards, quality, values, human rights, etc., the two-pronged approach of China to handle the internet content, strong surveillance of Chinese government, blocking of the website due to occurrence of issues regarding the level of censorship the company followed and what the authorities demanded, loss of market share to local players, such as Baidu, showed that the company should have done a deep analysis before entering the market regarding local needs and censorship issues. c. d. e. Bibliography f. Martin, Kirsten E. Google Inc. in China. 2007. 06 November 2012 . g. h. Read More