R U SRS: Google leaving because of Baidu?

I've seen a lot of coverage on the events recently plaguing our friendly software giant Google. There's a big scare over whether or not they are staying in the Chinese market, if their software is secure, and if it for some other reason than the recent hacking attacks. Some people have cited Baidu as the culprit, believing that Google is unsuccessful in competing.

Let's start out with some facts.

1. The Chinese internet enabled market is approximately 384million (Reuters). Taken into perspective, this is almost 30% larger than the entire US population.
2. Google entered the Chinese market in 2006
3. Google has since gained about 43% marketshare (statcounter w/ a nice graph).
4. Baidu has about 55% marketshare (statcounter)

Additionally, these "analyzations" might help you gain some perspective. In the last 4 years Google has gained more than 40% of the marketshare in China. Traditionally any US company entering China has had at least a difficult time. 10% a year is nothing to scoff at in any industry, ever, and given the context, astounding. Baidu and Google combined leave 2% to the rest. This implicates that Google has been taking marketshare primarily from their major competitor for the last four years. Comparitively, Yahoo and Microsoft, the next largest competitors in the US market only have 28% of the US market combined. (Business Insider) Add that to the fact that most of Bing's marketshare has been taken from Yahoo, not Google. How can people even think that competition with Baidu is even a minor reason for Google leaving China?

Quite frankly I think it would be a terrible idea to leave even if the reason is to "don't be evil." Google isn't the one being "evil" it's the Chinese government for forcing them to censor their results. I don't think that people understand that if they didn't censor their results, they wouldn't be able to do business in China. "Then why not leave China?" Because of the aforementioned 43% market share! You don't just leave when you've taken 40% of something. That'd be like if the Allied powers in WW2 took back 40% of Europe and then left because Germany was too strong of a competitor. (There's another metaphor about civilian losses equating to "don't be evil", but I'm gonna leave it at that.)

I'd speculate that Google isn't considering leaving China at all. They have this event that can finally show the rest of the world what they've been dealing with for the last 4 years. They gain some sympathy, draw more attention to China's practices, and work towards changing those practices. I'd jump a bit further into this rabbit hole and, perchance, dream that Google is talking to the Chinese government right now in a rascally marketing demeanor and saying that it would be a good move for China to stop censoring internet borne information.

Sources:

Reuters, Statcounter, Business Insider

citing done in links w/ accreditation throughout.