It had 31% in 2010, which had grown from 15% in 2006. What do you think would have happened if Google Play and Google didn't get blocked? I'll tell you, many Android phones in China would have come with Google as the default, and those numbers would have went up.
The blocking of Google.cn was more than just Search. YouTube, Drive, Gmail, Google Play, Maps, etc are all blocked. In 2010, Google and Amazon had an enormous advantage over BAT and if there was complete freedom, they would have taken substantially more of a chunk of services.
This is not a localization issue. Google has 86% marketshare in Hong Kong and 91% in Taiwan. Search and hosting services localize easily.
Google gave up an enormous opportunity by not being willing to kowtow to the standard practice of handing over half your company in a joint venture or adopting political control over information. If you look at the valuations of BAT, it was a substantial opportunity cost. But it was the right thing to do.
the name of your favourite search engine google can not even be spelt by most Chinese, out of their market share of 15%, many had to use baidu to search for the address of google to get there.
amazon never engaged in any real competition in China, it was ebay that lost the entire market because ebay was focusing on protecting buyers when taobao.com chose to better serve and protect sellers.
High market share in Hong Kong and Taiwan? Well, how many local internet companies are there in those two places? How many qualified software engineers they have locally produced?
You can keep worship google, the truth that you can never deny is that 10 years after google's exit, China's internet sector is more active and profitable than ever before with almost half of the the world top 10 Internet companies being Chinese. That brings huge number of both well paid and highly skilled jobs for Chinese. Such kind of personal freedom surely is not something you support.
Fact: They had a 36% market share at the highest, so more than 1/3 of their users apparently could "spell" 谷歌。 What do you mean by "spell"? Pinyin? Many people from the generation older than 35 don't even know Pinyin. I'm pretty sure KaiFu Li knew how to market in China.
The rest of your message seems bizarrely nationalistic. How many engineers has Taiwan produced? I don't see how that's relevant to Google's market share, but Taiwan has a thriving tech economy, and TSMC is one of the world leaders in semiconductor fabrication.
I get it, you want Google banned from China because you don't want domestic Chinese companies to face free and fair competition. Great, that's a perfectly fine position to have, just don't act like Google didn't pull out of China because of interference by the government and that Baidu won because of superior quality. It was not a purely market driven decision and you know it. Also, don't complain if China is eventually punished by the WTO for trade protectionism, or if Western countries start punishing Chinese companies. It's already started: Huawei for example. The world might have been willing to overlook it when China was less well developed, but now there's no excuse for it.
when asked "How many qualified software engineers they have locally produced?", you came up with TSMC as example? Is that a software related company? Do they build internet services to complete with Google? Let me respond to your high google marketshare in Taiwan claim again - Taiwan has far less qualified software engineers and thus impossible to come up with anything to complete with google services. As comparison, you probably see 1 million young graduates joining workforce to work as software engineers in mainland China every coupe of years, that is the difference you failed to even understand.
Is that nationalistic?
Now let's look at your ~30% marketshare claims - you intentionally refused to mentioned the fact that Baidu had its market share increased from 40% to 64% in the same period when google peaked in 2010 - baidu had bigger market share and even bigger market share growth. That is a typical sign of google losing the competition - winner takes all is the rule of the Internet, it is the rule served google so well in all other markets, it is the rule that helped google to completely wipe out yahoo search and bing.
Taiwan has less qualified and so it can't compete with Google services? Then how come the UK and Sweden have produced significant services on the world stage? Being able to compete is not a function of # of engineers. Silicon Valley is but a tiny fraction of the US population. It's more about the environment you engender and the kind of people you can attract, beyond just engineers. WhatsApp had 33 engineers and obtained 1 billion users.
If Baidu was already winning, then there's no need to block Google for competitive reasons, is there?
You seem to be arguing that Google was hurting the development of domestic talent, and then also arguing Baidu was going to win anyway. If so, why the need for protectionism then?
The blocking of Google.cn was more than just Search. YouTube, Drive, Gmail, Google Play, Maps, etc are all blocked. In 2010, Google and Amazon had an enormous advantage over BAT and if there was complete freedom, they would have taken substantially more of a chunk of services.
This is not a localization issue. Google has 86% marketshare in Hong Kong and 91% in Taiwan. Search and hosting services localize easily.
Google gave up an enormous opportunity by not being willing to kowtow to the standard practice of handing over half your company in a joint venture or adopting political control over information. If you look at the valuations of BAT, it was a substantial opportunity cost. But it was the right thing to do.