Admittedly I’m a big fan of Google, and I’ve been following the story about how Google might exit China because of China’s restrictions on the internet. While I understand what China wants to do, I certainly don’t agree with it. After all, America is the best and part of that “best” is free speech – and unrestricted access to the internet.

Google’s threat to exit this large and emerging country is just one more testimonial to Google’s strength – that strength largely defined as totally customer-centric. That’s right – the all-powerful Google is totally customer-centric in my mind, and if they exited China, their worldwide brand strength would likely only get stronger.

While we sometimes joke internally about how Google is “Sky-Net”…you know, the evil, machine-driven empire we know from all the Terminator movies – deep in our hearts we trust that Google will use all that information stored on their massive servers in a customer-centric way. It is tough to argue about a company that provides us with two of the best search engines (Google Search and YouTube), Google Earth, Apps, Analytics, Wave, etc. – and it is all free. Now that’s customer-centric. I believe their promise not to divulge the personal information to which they have direct access. And therefore, we are Google fans.

So, in this battle between China and Google, who do you want to win? The powerful government that restricts free-speech or the powerful, customer-centric company that helps bring so much to keyboards all across the world. You can tell who I’m rooting for – you go Google.