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In January I posted about the attack on Google that was suspected to be from China.  As the result of that attack, Google announced that it’s not going to censor search results for Chinese users any longer. Recently I read the other article about the consequences of that risky decision – the possibility of China brain drain. I can understand Google’s reasoning; they wanted revenge for the January attacks. Google wanted to teach the Chinese government a lesson of how bad it is to leave the hackers unpunished. I believe it was not a smart decision. Google had all its censoring capabilities working and in place to censor the search results in China; however, the company made an effort to disable them as revenge and without receiving any gain from doing that. Possibly, Google wanted to put the Chinese government under pressure to pursue them to find and prosecute the hackers, or to pay money for the loss of intellectual property, or to create a special anti-hacking division inside the country. Consequently, the Chinese government started thinking about blocking Google and developing an alternative search engine as powerful as Google. Not only did Google upset the Chinese government, it put its own employees in China under pressure. Google’s employees in China felt that they could lose their jobs if Google decided to cease its presence in China due to incompliance with Chinese censorship. As the result, in order to stay employed, Google employees were more willing to leave the company as their jobs became insecure. Moreover, as other Chinese companies offered them a competitive salary, some of the Google’s employees actually left the company. This is yet another example of the importance of the decision a company makes. Google made a poor decision and the Chinese market reacted smartly, benefiting from the mistake Google made. So, now Google is losing very good programmers, who also may happen to know the company’s secrets and implementation details of the world’s most popular search engine.

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