Suppose you go to check your email. And you can’t because it’s blocked. It’s blocked because you provider stopped service. But you’re not the only one. You find out everyone in your neighborhood, and eventually, everyone in your nation can no longer use a certain email provider.
This isn’t a movie plot. It’s really happening in China. Yahoo email in China is now no more. An announcement was made in April, so at least people had time to prepare. But now, that announcement is a reality. Yahoo China users are now emailing through an alternative provider. You can thank Chinese online titan Alibaba. They want to wean people off Yahoo and jump on their local Aliyun?email service. Yahoo will sill be used?in China, but only as a search engine.
Maybe wean isn’t the right word. This sounds more like force. There’s a part of me that admires Alibaba for this move. No disrespect to Yahoo by any means, but this is why China’s economy is growing the way it is. They’re slowly, but surely getting off foreign products and onto their local services. Meanwhile, they’re making products and exporting it to everybody else. And it’s happening in technology too. Can we learn a lesson from this?