It was reported that Chrome has been the
most popular desktop browser worldwide. But in mainland China, things seem
quite different.
According to StatCounter, Chrome controlled
51.31% of the world desktop usage share in October 2014, ranked as No.1, far
beyond that of IE, FireFox and other desktop browsers (StatCounter, 2014). While
according to the data from CNZZ (2014), we can find that the ratio of usage of
Chrome in mainland China is only 8.45%, ranked after IE (35.95%) and Qihoo 360
(28.04%).
 |
| Figure 1. The worldwide usage share of browsers. From statCounter. |
The difference between its usage share
worldwide and in mainland China is astounding! The question is, why?
Of course Google has shut down its search
service in mainland China, which may more or less influence the usage share of
the browser under its brand. However, chrome is not blocked in Chinese mainland
market anyway, and its fast speed, high stability and simple interface design
should still be attractive to Chinese net users. Actually, it’s understandable
that the usage share of Chrome is not as high as IE in mainland China, since IE
has been bundled with windows operating system, whose market share is still
over 90% by October 2014 according to data from tongji.baidu.com (2014). So the
most confusing and interesting question is: why does Chrome lag so far behind
Qihoo 360 in terms of usage share.
 |
| Figure 2. The market share of desktop operating systems in mainland China. From tongji.baidu.com. |
Since both of these two browsers are free,
it is logical to assume that the choice decisions of consumers are determined
mainly by how the browser can satisfy the consumers needs. To answer this
question, a survey was conducted among college students in mainland China to
see how they evaluate these two browsers’ performance.
After several interviews, 14 attributes
relevant to desktop browsers have been found to be important for consumers when
they make choices between different browsers including speed, stability,
anti-virus capacity, memory usage, CPU usage, simplicity of the interface
design, ad blocking feature, online banking and online payment support
function, safety for online shopping, account synchronization, smart search
bar, plug-ins and additional features, functional integration of the products
under the same brand, and large amount of users.
Table 1. Consumers’ evaluation of Qihoo 360
and Chrome.
N = 64
wi = The level of importance of the attributes. 1 = very unimportant,
7 = very important.
ei = How the browser performs on each attribute. 1= very
unsatisfactory, 7 = very satisfactory.
Survey results collected from 64
respondents have been shown in Table 1. So what can we see from this table?
It is interesting that though the overall
score Chrome got is higher, and it actually performs much better than Qihoo 360
on several attributes including speed, stability, simplicity of the interface
design and plug-ins and additional features, however, Chrome lags behind in
three very important attributes including safety for online shopping,
anti-virus capacity and online banking and online payment support function,
which ranked as the first, fourth and fifth respectively in terms of the level
of importance.
So, yes, the high speed and stability rendered
by Chrome is truly attractive, and Chinese people do realized the advantage of
Chrome in these aspect, however, it cannot outweigh its disadvantages in terms
of support for online shopping. In fact, it is claimed that many online banking
services and online payment services can only be used on IE or browsers with IE’s
rendering engine such as Qihoo 360. What’s worse, the lack of support for
online banking services may lead to consumers’ distrust of the browser’s
capacity of ensuring the safety of online shopping, while the promise of compensation
in case of any infringement happening offered by Qihoo 360 (users can get the compensation only when they do online shopping using Qihoo 360's browser) seems really
attractive and important for Chinese users. Considering the more and more
important role of e-commerce for Chinese people, it is really a big problem that
Chrome need to solve urgently if it does not want to lose more consumers.
In sum, for mainland China net users,
e-commerce is becoming a big part of their life, and more importantly, is
shaping their decisions on choosing relevant productions or applications more
and more often. It is time for Chrome to consider more seriously about this
issue and pursue more partnership with banks, institutions and companies in the
area of online banking and e-commerce.
Reference:
StatCounter. (2014). Top 5 Desktop Browsers
on October, 2014.
CNZZ. (2014). 桌面浏览器变化趋势.
百度统计流量研究院. 操作系统市场份额.
没有评论:
发表评论