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.'"
This is why Corporations Do Evil Things (Score:5, Interesting)
If you refuse to collaborate with repressive and corrupt government, refrain from pushing tax loopholes, lax regulations, and permissive laws, and treat your customers and employees fairly and respectfully, it's going to cost you money, at least in the short term. And your stockholders are only interested in money, and are not great at long-term thinking. Executives who don't maximize profits lose their jobs. So "profits over people" is not so much a sign of corporate depravity as a sign of an absence of corporate free will.
Google can get away with being an exception to this because Google is structured so that Brin, Page, and Schmidt between them have 2/3 of the voting power, even though their equity stake is less than 5%. This allows them to ignore the other stockholders and do things like turn their backs on the largest market on the planet for purely ethical reasons.
I guess this kind of corporate dictatorship is cool when it means that ethics can overcome greed. On the other hand, it also means that Google can't seem to outgrow its backyard hot tub origins [cnn.com].