2011年3月29日 星期二

批判与发展并行 谷歌在中国市场另辟蹊径

经济纵横 | 2011.03.29

批判与发展并行 谷歌在中国市场另辟蹊径

出于中国互联网管理政策以及本土竞争对手的影响,谷歌在中国的日子并不像它在世界其它国家一样风光。虽然谷歌在中国市场的占有率连连下降,但盈利却节节攀升。在与“中国特色”斗智斗勇的同时,谷歌并未将商业利益抛到脑后。

新浪与谷歌不再续约

法新社3月29日消息,中国最大的互联网门户网站新浪当日宣布,将使用自主开发的网络搜索引擎替代目前为止基于谷歌技术的搜索引擎。新浪公司发言人 刘奇称, 该公司与谷歌的合同将于本月底结束,新浪网站届时将开始使用自主开发的互联网搜索引擎。新浪公司亦表示,从此与谷歌之间不存在任何合作协议。

一年前,美国互联网搜索引擎提供商谷歌宣布不再接受中国政府对搜索内容的审查,将关闭中国大陆的搜索引擎,并将其移至香港。所有从中国大陆发出的搜 索要求都会自动地被转到谷歌香港的服务器处理运行。同年七月,谷歌公司在中国大陆的营业牌照到期。谷歌放弃了其中国网站自动跳转至香港网站的做法,以此获 得了中国政府颁发的营业牌照,得以保留中国大陆业务。

2010年3月 部分中国网民在谷歌公司门口为谷歌鲜花Bildunterschrift: 2010年3月 部分中国网民在谷歌公司门口为谷歌鲜花

谷歌对中国政府的新指责

最近,从谷歌公司又不断传来抱怨的声音,指责中国政府组织黑客对其用户的电子邮件信箱(gmail)展开攻击。谷歌称,许多电子邮件的普通功能,比 如发送邮件或者将邮件标记为未读功能出现大范围故障。该公司相信这是中国政府指导黑客精心策划的一次行动,使用的技术高明,以至于普通用户相信是谷歌的邮 件系统出现了问题。

针对谷歌的这一指责,中国政府立即作出反应。中国外交部发言人姜瑜3月22日在例行的新闻发布会上表示,不接受谷歌对中国阻拦谷歌邮箱服务的指控。在此问题上,姜瑜拒绝进一步的评价。

谷歌中国盈利创纪录

谷歌公司与中国政府就审查和干扰问题展开争执的同时,也没有忘记在中国市场加紧开拓新业务。公司发言人称,谷歌目前在中国市场的主要盈利手段为网络 广告销售,以及互联网新型广告设计。虽然有像谷歌退出中国,以及新浪停止技术合作这样利空消息存在,但这并不会影响谷歌公司在中国的盈利额不断攀升。公司 新任董事兼中国区产品管理负责人埃利奥特·恩格(Elliot Ng)在接受《华尔街日报》采访时表示,凭借广告业绩的增长,谷歌中国去年12月份创造了分公司成立以来的盈利记录。谷歌公司2010年第四季度营业额超 过84亿美金,美国本土外国际市场的营业收入占公司总收入的一半。

尽管如此,政府的管治以及像百度、新浪、搜狐这些来自中国本土的竞争者使得谷歌在中国的市场占有率持续下跌。在这种情况下,公司的盈利仍然能逆势上 涨的原因来自中国爆炸式发展的网络广告市场。中国互联网数据中心的调查结果显示,2011年中国互联网广告销售市场的总体规模将超过300亿元人民币,并 将以超过30%的增长速度持续扩张。

新业务领域促进长足增长

除了广告收入以外,谷歌在中国的另外一个潜在盈利法宝是其自主开发的移动设备操作系统Android. 公司亚太区总裁阿利格瑞(Daniel Alegre)在接受《华尔街日报》采访表示,与中国政府的冲突并未妨碍公司在中国推出Android手机的能力。Android 是一个开放的平台,任何人都可以使用并参与到开发的行列中来。谷歌已经和中国移动就此展开合作,推出了一系列以Android为操作平台的智能手机。

分析人士认为,谷歌在中国的行动能力虽然大大受限,但仍可以通过代理人或合资企业使中国感受到它的存在。对于谷歌来说,中国不仅仅拥有潜力巨大的市场,其充足的专业技术人才也可以使谷歌中国成为向世界其它市场提供技术服务的全球运营服务提供商。

作者:任琛

责编:洪沙

2011年3月28日 星期一

Gmail

今天有個應用

Chen: 對阿, 讀書
大陸有一個財經名嘴叫郎咸平您有聽過嗎?
me:
Chen: 他倒是滿有趣的書店很多他的書他是台灣人
CCTV 2也經常有他的電視演講
如果您對財經有興趣的話 可以翻翻
他可能可以算是財經界的李敖
me: 哈哈 妙 有緣再說
郎咸平

後來發現Gmail的FT和WSJ 有11處提到他

Gmail: Can't Live with It — or Without It

On April 1, 2004, Google announced that it was getting into the e-mail business. Its Web-based, ad-supported service, Gmail, wasn't much more than a basic inbox with a great search feature. But it offered 1 GB of storage for free in an era when 1/250th of that amount was considered luxurious, leaving some observers — myself included — wondering if the press release trumpeting Gmail was an April Fools' prank.

Nowadays, when Gmail makes headlines, it's often for service hiccups. Outages and slowdowns, usually brief and isolated, are fodder for both news stories and panicky tweets ("Is Gmail down for everybody or just me?"). Last month an embarrassing bug crippled the service for about .02% of users — 30,000 folks — for five days. When you're as central to the way people get stuff done as Gmail is, trouble for a tiny percentage of users is still trouble for a lot of people. (See 10 Gmail tricks you might not know.)

Gmail's biggest challenge isn't its reliability record, which remains sterling compared with most of the corporate e-mail systems it's been known to replace. It's the sheer number of things it does. Little by little, 2004's stripped-down Web mail morphed into a kitchen sink.

The emphasis on crazy quantities of storage remains — I currently have 1.8 GB of e-mail and 5.5 GB of room to spare. There's no longer anything basic about the service, though. It's chockablock with features, options and related tools, some of which are only tangentially related to e-mail. You can use it to place phone calls to any landline in the U.S. for free. And make video calls. And send text messages or do instant messaging. You can manage your calendar on the left and your to-do list on the right. Did I mention Buzz, the Twitter-like social network that was briefly controversial last year before sinking largely unnoticed into the Gmail gumbo?

A Google engineer invented Gmail in his spare time, and the current incarnation still feels like a bunch of geeks built it to please themselves. More than 50 features reside in its Labs section, a repository of optional, experimental tools that's an interesting peephole into the minds of the developers. Some of the Labs features are straightforward and useful, like extra keyboard shortcuts and the ability to view Flickr photos inside messages. Others are a tad idiosyncratic, like Don't Forget Bob, which looks at a message's recipients and suggests other people you might want to add to the list. And a few are downright peculiar, like Mail Goggles, which forces you to perform simple math problems before permitting you to send e-mail late at night over the weekend — just in case you partied too heartily and are about to send a message you'll later regret.

I use and like numerous Labs features, but exploring the offerings always leaves me wishing that the Gmail team spent less time on quirky side projects and more time on the fundamentals. For instance, Gmail's user interface is a cacophony of links, buttons, menus and lists, with none of the pithy discipline of the Google.com home page. For years, the inbox let you read messages only in a threaded view called Conversations, which people tended to either adore or despise. It recently started allowing you to switch to a conventional, unthreaded view but still doesn't offer the option that makes the most sense to my particular brain: Conversations sorted in reverse-chronological order, like the inbox itself. (By organizing them with the oldest messages at the top, Gmail requires superfluous scrolling to get to the most recent items.) (See Google in TIME's list of the 50 best iPhone apps of 2011.)

Every so often, I get fed up with Gmail and flee. Sometimes I abscond to a big-name rival like Microsoft's recently spruced-up Hotmail, and sometimes to a spunky upstart like Threadsy. (Thanks to Gmail's support for the IMAP e-mail protocol, it's possible to abandon it for an alternative and take your e-mail address and mail with you.) So far, I have always come skulking back. For all of Gmail's flaws, it has the same relationship to other e-mail clients that Churchill said democracy has to other forms of government: it's the worst one except for everything else.

Part of the problem isn't Gmail but e-mail itself. Programmer Ray Tomlinson invented it in 1971, when the only people on the Internet were a smattering of government researchers and academics. Today e-mail is abused as much as it's used, by spammers, marketers, nutty uncles and others who bombard our inboxes. Once an unimaginably speedy form of communication, it can feel plodding and overcomplicated compared with younger, sprightlier alternatives such as Twitter, Facebook Messages and text messaging. Maybe that explains why young people aren't all that attached to it. (A recent survey said the amount of time 12-to-17-year-olds spent using Web-mail services like Gmail on their computers tumbled 48% in a year.)

In short, e-mail is ripe for reinvention. Google is doing its part with Priority Inbox, which monitors your Gmail inbox, watching which messages you open and attempting to push the one you'll want to read right away to the top. For me, the option seemed hopelessly crude and confusing at first. But once we figured each other out, it became a compelling reason to stick with Gmail rather than leave in a snit. (See the promises and pitfalls of cloud computing.)

Google's most radical rethinking of e-mail didn't show up within Gmail, however — it was with Wave, a stand-alone service that the company announced in 2009. Wave didn't set out to improve e-mail so much as replace it with a hybrid of mail, instant messaging, word processing and file sharing, and it was rife with big ideas. (As you typed a message, your correspondents could see it arrive character by character, typos and all.)

The company unveiled Wave with hoopla that might have impressed even Steve Jobs, put it into beta testing, and opened it up to the public. And then ... Google pulled the plug after just a few months when the service wasn't an immediate hit. It was a little as if Ray Tomlinson had given up on this e-mail thing in 1972. (Comment on this story.)

I hope the Wave wipeout hasn't left Google too timid. Reinventing e-mail may be a daunting proposition, but reinventing just one e-mail service — Gmail — would be a great start. And in this case, the best way to reinvent it might be to bring back some of the minimalist thinking that helped make Gmail such a wonder back in 2004.

McCracken blogs about personal technology at Technologizer, which he founded in 2008 after nearly two decades as a tech journalist; on Twitter, he's @harrymccracken. His column, also called Technologizer, appears every Thursday on TIME.com.

2011年3月21日 星期一

Google Claims China Interference

Google Claims China Interference
Weeks of government disruption of Google's Gmail service and of services used to circumvent Web censorship is fueling frustration among Internet users in China, along with concerns the curbs may be long-lasting.

2011年3月1日 星期二

15萬個Gmail帳戶受到影響

歌公司(Google Inc.)向近日郵件遭刪除的Gmail用戶致歉﹐並承諾很快將恢復這些被誤刪的郵件。此前﹐系統升級軟件的程序漏洞導致一些Gmail用戶的郵件丟失。

不過﹐數據恢復比通常所需時間要長﹐因為谷歌正通過技術相對落後的磁帶存儲系統恢復郵件數據。

谷歌在一則博文中解釋說﹐儘管谷歌在多個數據中心保存了所有用戶郵件的數個電子副本﹐但這個軟件錯誤破壞了被刪郵件的所有電子備份。不過被刪除的電子郵件可以在磁帶存儲系統中找到﹐這些磁帶是離線的﹐因此不受這類軟件漏洞影響。

谷歌最初估計有0.29%的Gmail用戶受到了影響﹐但隨後將這一數字修正為0.02%。這意味著大約有幾萬個Gmail帳戶受到影響。

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