♥♥Google♥♥

Google is a highly successful Internet business. Recently they have broadened their scope with a multitude of new tools. Research Google’s business model and answer the following questions below. You may add additional information not included in these questions.

Questions:
Explain Google’s business model.
1. Who are their competitors?
2. How have they used information technology to their advantage?
3. How competitive are they in the market?
4. What new services do they offer?
5. What makes them so unique?
6. How competitive are they in the international market?

Google’s Profile:
Google Incorporation is one company that earns its profit mainly from advertising using their very own Google search engine, Gmail e-mail service, Google Maps, Google Apps, Orkut social networking and Youtube video sharing, which are all offered to the public for free. It is a public corporation of the Americans and Googleplex, its headquarter is located at Mountain View, California since 2003. This company continues to grow very well and was being ranked number one by Fortune Magazine's as the "Best Place to Work In" for multiple times. The name "Google" was originated from the word "googol" which means 10 raised to the power of hundred or 1 with a hundred of zeroes, and "googol" was often misspelled as "google". Since this term has been increasingly used in our everyday language, "google" was added into the dictionaries, carrying the meaning of "obtaining information using the Internet through Google Search Engine".
Google is a corporation that is becoming more profitable by the day. This massive internet giant has a continuous growth that has made it one of the richest technology based companies in the world. It currently employs thousands of people has has stretched itself across the four corners of the cyber world. This all begs the question; how are Google achieving this? Google's business model boils down to two primary focuses advertising and innovation. Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have said themselves that the current pre-dominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. Google Ads went from a means to generate the necessary revenue to keep the budding search engine on its feet to a profit machine that became a key focus in Google's business plans. This form of advertising is cheap for businesses to buy, easy for Google to distribute and highly profitable. On top of all this, the ingenuity of it is that it allows other individuals to generate their own money by getting other web users to click on the advertisements when they visit their web site. Within no time businesses and indivduals alike wanted a piece of the Google Ads action. This sudden popularity was used as part of the model and therefore allowed Google to get its own name around the cyber world, quickly gaining the title of biggest search giant. It has been growing ever since. The other side of Google's hugely successful business plan is innovation. The Google brand became one of the internets most well known names within just years of it being in operation. The advertisement system and the quality of Google's search algorithms set the search engine at the top of its game. Realising that their success couldn't just stop there, Google turned to innovation. The company quickly expanded, providing endless services to the individual; Google News, Google Maps, Google Earth, Froogle, Google Scholar, Google Products the list goes on an on. Innovation became a key part of Google's business plan as it allowed them to expand at the rate they do.

In summary, simplistic as they are, these two foundations of the Google business model have been extra-ordinarily successful, and their continuing ingenuity will probably provide growth for this vast company for a long time.

Google’s Competitors:
1. Apple
2. Microsoft
3. Amazon
4. Facebook
5. Twitter
6. Mozilla
7. Yahoo
8. Cisco
9. IBM
10. Nokia

Googles Business strategy and competative advantage
Google's advantage is more of a company philosophy than a technical
advantage. Thus far they have simply remembered what works on the
Internet. I have read an article frm net. It goes like this .When people talk about Google as a corporate entity, they often talk—jealously, at times—about the company’s innovative culture, with its sprawling campus, free meals and endless amenities. One of the people at the forefront of that culture is Google’s CIO. Ben Fried believes that IT plays a pivotal role in building a great culture—and subsequently a great company—and he puts it into practice in a number of ways. One part of that is making technology accessible and open. By giving users what they want—instead of what the company believes is best—Fried believes CIOs can empower employees to do more. “It’s almost insulting to people when they hear, ‘We know better than you how it’s best for you to work,’” he says. And the company benefits not only from the increased productivity and morale, but also when recruiting talented support professionals.

But it also puts a good face on IT. In an era in which business users believe their IT organizations take too long and spend too much for products and services that don’t meet their needs, CIOs and their teams need to make smarter decisions, he says. Fried has gleaned these and other lessons from his time at Google, and from his previous work as an infrastructure architect at Morgan Stanley. Fried spoke recently about his IT leadership philosophy with CIO Insight Editor in Chief Brian P. Watson.

How competitive are they in the market?
I have read news from net and it says “The latest data released from comScore explains global search results for 2009, with some very familiar trends, as well as some very interesting new trends. The most obvious and familiar trend is Google retaining its lead among the search made worldwide, however the most surprising new trend is that Microsoft has increased its market share considerably. Of the top three major search engines Yahoo got the lowest percentage change, year on year, for 2009. Google had 87.8 billion searches in 2009 which is a 58% increase from 2008, a lo0ng way behind came Yahoo with 9.4 billion searches and a 13% increase from 2009. The main surprise of the new data is Microsoft who came in fourth place with 4.1 billion searches – a huge 70% leap from 2008 search market data…”

Using Google Analytics Aggregated data Google can collect statistics regarding other search engines and how they refer you to sites.
In effect what keywords they refer, vs. what keywords others refer. They also can get raw counts in the number of unique visitors and total visitors by referrer This is only possible because Google Analytics is a centralized web application maintained and operated by Google vs. AWStats another common used analytics platform which is installed maintained and operated by the webmaster. Food for thought: What other web applications have shifted paradigms and what effect and potential does all this newly related aggregated data worth.

• Imagine that Google Spreadsheets can be used to aggregate related ideas in effect creating a sort of GoogleSets.
• Imagine that GoogleTalk can be used to aggregate written context in effect creating Artificial Intelligence Chatbots with similar effects of Jabberwacky.com and beyond
• Imagine that Google Writeley can be used to aggregate thought, not just necessarily of what you write but more specifically what you write, when you write it, how you write, and revise including the whole process etc
• Imagine in effect borrowing the collective intelligence from its users.

Google Offers New Services

Here are the lists:

New Storage Service
Google Inc has announced its very own cloud-based online storage service which will allow Google Docs users to upload any type of file of up to 250 MB while they will have access to a total storage capacity of 1GB.
(14 January, 2010, by Desire Athow)

Google Click-to-Call (Billing) in Ads on Mobile Devices
Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.”
(Jan 5, 2010 at 7:59am ET by Greg Sterling)

Google Goggles
A new service that promises to make searching the internet as easy as taking a photo. The application, which will premier on Android devices, will let a user snap a photo of anything and then Google will deliver search results based on that image.
(December 7th, 2009 by Stefan Constantinescu)

Free DNS Service
Google just released their newest service which is public DNS. DNS is one of the most important services when it comes to using the internet. The main reason to use the service is reliability, speed and increased security. Google has put in other measures to help with overall security.
(December 5th 2009 by serverguy)

Google Phone – Nexus One -
Nexus One is expected to display the latest generation of Linux-based open sourceAndroid operating system. In fact, this is also first phone that will be marketed directly by Google, in turn setting up extremely higher expectations for the product. Engadget has already reviewed the phone before the launch and it beings some interesting set of information you might link to know. The phone is also said to bring tough competition for Apple iPhone.

Google’s Caffeine Search Engine -
Caffeine is the next version of Google’s search-engine infrastructure and will soon be available to the wider audience. Caffeine engine is expected to offer technology to deliver faster and more accurate results. This version was available for test and there is no specific date for launch given yet, but Google is sure to develop it fully in early 2010

Google’s Ebook Store -
Google has always been fond of books and have encouraged it reader to take part often. With that love Google now plans to launch an online store for ebooks, which is expected to come in the first half of 2010. Google Ebook store will have half a million books initially in partner will few publishers. On the launch it is expected to have more than 500,000 books ready to be purchased from online stores such as Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.

Google Chrome OS -
Google Chrome Brower was a great hit and recently it also moved ahead of Apple Safari. And next in store we have Google Chrome OS – an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted only at netbooks. Google has planned to open-source its code, and will make Google Chrome OS available to users in the second half of 2010

5. Google Drive – GDrive
Users usually have complained of not having enough space for them to store emails, photos, and files. With that in mind, Google came up the idea of Gdrive included in Google pack – online file backup and storage service from Google that integrated with Google services like Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, Google Calendars, and many others. GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, anytime, and from any device – be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone. Google Drive is highly anticipated and expected to be released in 2010 but it will only be an extended version of Google Docs. Instead of sending attachments, you’ll be able to upload files to Google Drive from Gmail.


What makes google unigue?
Based on my readings from the internet, the things which makes google a unigue one is that Google grows in a natural fashion, unlike any other company I know of. Google develops tools that are internally useful and then releases them to the world. Google does not develop products to sell to the world. Google does not have external contracts, at least in the traditional sense, as far as I can tell. Google is obviously best known for search and for ads associated with search. This is in essence Google’s one true product. It is the one feature Google developed for the outside world. When Google developed search it was no different from a small company. It is what Google has done since then that makes Google different. Google doesn’t answer to any external power. They don’t have anyone they have to deliver a product to. There is no contract with a deadline. Due to not having any external dependencies, Google can continuously iterate over a product until it reaches a state of near perfection. It can stay in internal testing as long as Google wants and no one is going to care. See Gmail, Google Maps, etc. This then allows Google to use the perfect form of the alert process. Continuous iterations and testing and development, continues improvement. Then as Google sees fit, release the products. As they get better and better, more people use them and more money from ads comes in. It’s also unlikely any other company is going to be able to pull this off. Google hit on the formula for ads before anyone else. They now have such a commanding lead in that arena that to compete with them you need deep pockets of money of your own. That makes it difficult to launch a company and follow Google’s lead of avoiding external dependencies and having the near perfect product development process. Google’s contracts are different from most companies’ contracts. Google isn’t developing a product for these companies. All they are doing is giving them an existing product that Google has already completed and released. Development on that product might still be happening, but it happens within Google, not within the kingdom of the contract. Google is still free to develop how ever they want.


References:
http://google.com/
http://www.google-search-engine-optimization.com/2009/01/google-incorporation.html
http://scenariothinking.org/wiki/images/2/2d/GoogleBizModel.png
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/02/09/google-launches-competitor-to-twitter-then-facebook-called-google-
http://www.reportlinker.com/p053261/Google-Company-Profile.html
http://www.seoconsult.co.uk/SEO-News/search-engine-marketing/microsoft-increases-market-share-but-google-are-still-top-of-the-search-tree.html
http://mashable.com/2009/08/03/bing-market-share/