How’s this for a job: run the foreign arm of a gigantic corporation, and don’t worry about making any money for, oh, four or so years. That’s apparently what Google’s Kai-Fu Lee has been told to do in China. Yet Lee has other responsibilities, and CEO Eric Schmidt claims to be more than satisfied with the man’s performance.
“Lee understands that, at this point in Google China’s progress, Schmidt is concerned about ‘nothing but’ the growing head count,” reports Caijing.com. “Then follows his second-year question about how much we’ve achieved in R&D development,’ Lee said. ‘Data on Web page hits is after that. And probably in our fourth year, we need to talk about our earnings.”
In the meantime, Schmidt was quoted as saying that he’s ninety-five percent satisfied with Google’s employees in China. Never mind Baidu’s comparatively huge market share, or several embarrassing incidents (four of which Caijing.com outlines); “China is a nation with 5,000-year history. That could indicate the duration for our patience,” Schmidt maintained.
Still, there are some indications that the CEO isn’t willing to wait forever. Despite being “very proud of what Kai-fu has done,” he stated, “Google.cn will continue to get better and better – and more quickly.” Put a little stress on the “more quickly” part of that sentence, and it becomes hard to believe that Schmidt will stand by Lee for too long if this improvement doesn’t take place.
Hat tip to Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped.
