Behind the Decline at China’s Tech Giant Baidu — The Information (Mar 29, 2017)
This is a fascinating piece, and well worth a read if you’re interested in the Chinese tech market. It’s a market I follow less closely, but I was struck by Baidu’s recent decline in fortunes and Alibaba’s rapid rise in the ad business when I was doing research for a recent piece on global ad revenue leaders. Baidu has always been referred to as the Chinese Google, and although that’s a horrible oversimplification, it’s hard to avoid the sense in reading this article that part of its trouble stems from pursuing many of the same areas and strategies as Google but with less success. Even the resentment among the successful search advertising employees of higher profile but non revenue generating businesses is reminiscent of the situation at Alphabet, though the latter has been reining in some of its excesses lately. Even outside the Chinese, context, though, this is a good cautionary tale on how quickly seemingly indomitable Internet companies can see their fortunes turn south.
via The Information
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