Where's Yahoo? [LWN.net]

Where's Yahoo?

Posted Jan 13, 2010 6:05 UTC (Wed) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051)
Parent article: Google: a new approach to China

The stark contrast between Gaoogle and Yahoo's behavior in CHina shows that modern companies can gain a competitive advantage from making aggressively ethical moves where there is actual financial risk involved. Will Yahoo join Google and stop *actively* assisting the PRC to stifle dissent?

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Where's Yahoo?

Posted Jan 13, 2010 8:12 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

Yahoo aren't trying to shift users onto a web-based business suite. That's what this is *really* about - the thing about search is Google just flipping the bird at China. I'm sure they make decent advertising revenue from China, but I bet it's not something they'd lose sleep over at this point.

What has set them off is China attempting to access Gmail. Sod human rights activists; if *businesses* get whiffs of China doing this, they're not going to trust Gmail with their mail, or Google apps with their documents, etc. That's no good for the business model Google are trying to execute, and they already have some big businesses with some really tasty IP already signed up to their system: those customers could assume that putting this data on there basically risks exporting it to China, where a string of knock-offs would suddenly appear. Google simply cannot risk that.