Google Stops Offering Free Music Service In China 67
SquarePixel writes "Google has yanked its free music service in China after being unable to make it popular enough. The service offered Chinese people free licensed music downloads and was launched in 2009 to compete with the rival search engine Baidu. 'Once China's second largest search provider, Google has now fallen to fourth place, overtaken by other local companies. — Google's popularity in the country has waned ever since 2010, when the company pulled the plug on its China-based search engine following disputes with the government over censorship and hacking concerns. Google's market share is at 5 percent, while Baidu's is 74 percent.'"
Re:Wah! (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's losing them money and they are losing market share, why not?
It was a gimmick to gain market share, it failed, so why keep doing it?
Re:This is why Corporations Do Evil Things (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should anyone give a shit if Google can "outgrow their backyard hot tub origins"? Google is already a big company, and globally recognized. Isn't that good enough? This American obsession with growing and growing without end needs to stop. Companies don't need to grow. They need to grow to a comfortable size, and then when they're at an efficient size for whatever they're doing, they should be able to just maintain that size, provide good products and services and provide good employment for their employees and be profitable, and that should be good enough, without a bunch of morons whining about how they're not growing any more and this makes them "stagnant".