《纽约时报》美国互联网公司为何纷纷在中国失败.docVIP

【中英文双语阅读】 《纽约时报》：美国互联网公司为何纷纷在中国失败 If Google pulls out of China because of frustration with government restrictions, it will not be the first time an American Internet giant has retreated from the country.EBay and Yahoo arrived with high hopes for a market that failed to live up to their expectations. Social sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have never managed to gain a significant foothold in China, partly because of government blocking and censorship and partly because most major Chinese Internet companies offer popular social networking features of their own.In fact, no major American Internet company has dominated its field in China, which by some measures is the world’s largest Internet market. Many experts thought Google would be the first.“There’s no U.S. Internet company close to being a leader here,” says Gary Rieschel, founder and managing director of Qiming Venture Partners, a venture capital firm. “And most of the wounds are self-inflicted.”While each failure has been different, analysts say the cases may help explain why Google is frustrated — not just by government censors but by its inability to catch its big Chinese rival, Baidu.Google, an Internet Goliath with $22 billion in revenue and some of the smartest people on the planet, is getting clobbered in China, holding 33 percent of the search engine market to Baidu’s 63 percent. Google has gained significant market share since it formally entered China five years ago, but almost all of that has come from smaller rivals. Baidu also gained market share in that time.No one expected it to be this way. America’s bleeding-edge technology giants came here armed with cash, intellectual property and an ability to manage complex networks and introverted workers. They each bought or invested in local Internet companies and hired Chinese executives, and they worked to show sensitivity to the byzantine social customs of the world’s most populous country. But all of them were outsmarted in diff