Someone who’s too weak, lazy, or pressed for time to type eight letters and a period is in serious trouble. But anyone who would rather type eight than three is just silly, and so Google China has unveiled a new domain name: G.cn.
G.cn takes users straight to Google.cn, where everything will perform just as it always has (or hasn’t). For Google fans who are at a traditional keyboard, it’s a neat time-saving measure. Where the search giant really hopes to succeed, though, is probably with users who prefer Baidu.
Confession time: I like the BBC far more than CNN – it tends to deliver real world news, as opposed to stories about American entertainers. When I was much younger, though, I thought that typing out news.bbc.co.uk was the only way to reach the BBC news site, and so I’d often head to CNN instead. (It was a happy day when I discovered that bbcnews.com took me where I wanted to go.)
If Chinese citizens succumb to the same laziness, Baidu.com could lose out in a big way to G.cn. The likelihood of this happening – which is admittedly small – is compounded once you think about the booming mobile market in China; hitting fewer keys means a lot to people using tiny cell phones.
So what seems almost like a cheap trick is actually something of a brilliant move. Kai-Fu Lee – or whoever thought of launching G.cn – deserves a big bonus.
