Another Google Product Exits Mainland China
Recently, I migrated the server overseas, and the access speed has slowed down a lot. Fortunately, this site is mainly used to record some of my daily trivia, and not many people visit it, so I don’t care much about the browsing experience.
During the process of migrating the server, looking for tutorials, and using the Chrome browser to translate web pages, I found that the translation function could not be used. I Googled it and found out that Google claimed that due to the low usage rate of the translation function in China, it stopped its service in China. Along with the translation, Google’s own game platform Stadia was also shut down. Shutting down translation has little impact. But Stadia is a platform, and the games on it all come from external game companies and studios. With the closure of the platform, the time, money, and manpower invested by these external institutions were all wasted. No one in the game industry will trust Google anymore.
As a Google fan who used to use the entire family of Google software and hardware, I have replaced Google services one by one like cutting meat with a dull knife. Currently, only email, search, and browser are left in use, and now the browser’s translation function is no longer usable.
Thinking back to those years, a batch of excellent Google products such as Search, Google Pinyin Input Method, Gmail, Maps, and Browser set a paradigm for product development in the entire Internet circle. Once upon a time, there was technical news related to Google on the Internet every day. It was a company at the forefront of the Internet. For this reason, I also seriously read “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days”, which benefited me a lot. Later, I read about the OKR working method used by Google. But in recent years, it seems to have been silent.
With Google’s withdrawal from the Chinese business, Google’s new product development has almost ceased to consider the usage habits of Chinese users, so some new products developed later also made Chinese users feel out of touch.
Fortunately, Google seems not to have developed many consumer-grade products in recent years. The frequently used Search, Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Drive, Android system, Play Store, Photos, and YouTube are all products from before 2012.
Published at: Oct 23, 2022 · Modified at: Dec 11, 2025
