Case #1

The "GOOGLE"

Google is a highly successful internet business. Recently they have broaden their scope with multitude new tool. Research Google business model and answer the following questions below. You may add additional information not included in this question.

1. Who are their competitors?

-Although the technology looks promising, Teoma and Wisenut may have some difficulty wooing partners away from more established players, search experts said. “Teoma’s technology looks very good, and its results are relevant,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com. “That’s hopeful because if they are trying to compete with Google they’re not at an immediate disadvantage. But its big weakness is that its database isn’t very large...Their real challenge will be to win new customers, and it’s going to be harder to try to convince some of them that they should come away from Google.The rivals have surfaced at a time when the face of Internet search is changing. Many major search services are taking on paid listing models to fuel their results and boost revenues while advertising dollars remain scarce. Inktomi, AltaVista and Fast Search are just a few companies allowing marketers to pay for prominence in search results—a trend that came into vogue with the success of for-fee engine GoTo.com.Signaling the widespread acceptance of the model, Microsoft’s MSN and AOL Time Warner’s Netscape are licensing search technology from paid-listing services. But the practice has come under fire by consumer-advocacy group Commercial Alert, which faults MSN and others for failing to adequately disclose that many of the top search results are bought.


2. How have they use information technology to their advantage?

Google provides the fastest, most accurate results required a new kind of server setup. Whereas most search engines ran off a handful of large servers that often slowed under peak loads, ours employed linked PCs to quickly find each query's answer. The innovation paid off in faster response times, greater scalability and lower costs. It's an idea that others have since copied, while we have continued to refine our back-end technology to make it even more efficient.

Google provides:

* Better and quicker search results
* Advanced search features, including searching for videos and audio content as well as PDF, .doc and .ppt files
* Easy and powerful search administration
* Easy integration into web sites

Google continues to think about ways in which technology can improve upon existing ways of doing business. New areas are explored, ideas prototyped and budding services nurtured to make them more useful to advertisers and publishers. However, no matter how distant Google's business model grows from its origins, the root remains providing useful and relevant information to those who are the most important part of the ecosystem – the millions of individuals around the world who rely on Google search to provide the answers they are seeking.

According to (http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html)
The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we're able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.


3. How competitive are they in the market?

As we know Google is very competitive its because they are all over the world, anyone can use google for searching, posting, etc. Google’s content comprises between 6 and 10 percent of global Internet traffic, making its internal network one of the top three ISPs in the world, according to Arbor Networks. Technology has come a long way since then, and the face of the web has changed. Recognizing that search is a problem that will never be solved, we continue to push the limits of existing technology to provide a fast, accurate and easy-to-use service that anyone seeking information can access. Even a Microsoft won a victory recently against its new and increasingly agile young competitor google in the case of Kai-Fu-Lee, Google continous to nibble at the margins of Microsoft more existential question- the need for its software in the first place in an age when web development archetecture has taken the "Web 2.0" route offered by schemes like AJAX.



4. What new services do they offer?

• Google Lively was a web-based virtual environment that allowed as many as 20 people to sit in a virtual room and chat with each other. The offering debuted in July 2008 only to have Google pull the plug a mere four months later.

• Google Print Ads was dropped earlier this year after the company’s vision of bringing web-like automation to the world of traditional media failed to materialize. The effort went belly-up just three weeks before the death of Google Audio Ads, which ended a three-year run in February after the company failed to gain traction in the radio ad game.

• Google Answers spent a year in beta before a full-blown launch in May 2003, but the effort to create a fee-based knowledge market never gained much traction outside a small base of users and the service was dropped in late 2006.

• The social networking site Orkut launched early in 2004 as an independent project of noted Google developer Orkut Büyükkökten and has caught fire in Brazil, a market that accounts for roughly 50 percent of its membership. The site reportedly claims roughly 100 million users, which is impressive, but Google can’t be happy that its effort is virtually unknown in Europe and North America while Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and others have gained such impressive traction.

• Google Catalog Search debuted in 2001 as a way for consumers to go online to check out their favorite print catalogs that had been scanned and uploaded. Of course, retailers were already taking their inventories online themselves, and the effort was put to rest earlier this year.

• Google Health was released as a beta test in May 2008, but the service has yet to find much of an audience among insurers or the general public. Which may have something to do with the combination of the words “health” and “beta test.”

• The location-based service Dodgeball was shut down in 2009 after Google had acquired it four years earlier, and while Google continues to operate Jaiku – a social networking service it picked up in 2007 — the company has effectively abandoned the project. The technologies and expertise from both startups is being incorporated into other Google businesses and projects, however.

5. What them so unique?

Previously I’ve written about the corporate culture at Google and how it isn’t likely to be an easy thing to emulate. Today at work, my coworker, Jackson, showed me this post that links to a slide show that delves into Google’s internal processes. Another post that I recently read was Steve Yegge’s post on Good Agile, Bad Agile, in which Steve explores Google’s version of agile.

Needless to say, it all adds up to a lot of Google on the brain. Google, at the moment, is held up as the gold standard of software companies. They have achieved massive success and are the company almost every developer wants to work for. Ask someone in the software industry which company they want to emulate and they will likely say Google.

Obviously, if it was easy to emulate Google, everyone would have done it or would be doing it by now. The more I think about Google, the more and more I think it is going to be impossible to emulate them. Certainly you can steal some of their ideas and what they’ve pioneered and put it to use in your company, but outright copying Google is going to be near impossible.

Having touched on Google’s corporate culture, let’s look at something else that makes Google even more unique: how it grows.

One thing that has become evident to me is that Google grows in an organic 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.

Let me elaborate on this. 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.

6. How competitive are they in the international market?

Having studied Google abroad somewhat significantly, I believe this article provides a very naïve view on Google’s success abroad. Absolutely, Google, as any American company, needs to be extremely aware of the impression they make when entering foreign grounds, as the risk as being seen as arrogant – the ugly American – is omnipresent. And, yes, Google should continue to grow their in-country teams significantly in order to best overcome cultural and sales hurdles and take advantage of unique opportunities and the gigantic world market that is growing at a quicker pace than the U.S. market. Recent stats point to European e-commerce in a position to surge past U.S. e-commerce.

Yet, don’t attempt to fool anyone here: Google has enormous international market share. Though I’m on a plane and not able to access these stats immediately, I believe that Google has approximately a 10-point higher share of search in Europe than they do in the States. I attended an online and multi-channel retail conference in London earlier this year, and Google was constantly mentioned, and never in a bad light. I am attempting to arrange a dinner in Paris later this year or early next with top French e-commerce companies, and Google is the likely sponsor, due to their relationship with the French agency that I am in contact with and their relationship with the likely invitees. Google is dominant in most countries, with their distant following to Baidu in China and the Russian example in the article notable exceptions.

In the UK, Amazon.com and eBay have also taken off after some early slips and command a dominant share of the market. Of course, they face hurdles, most notably eBay’s fraud and trust problem, but these American brands have also experienced tremendous success abroad. And there are other huge hurdles across Europe, such as Germany’s reliance on non-credit card payments and their language and cultural barriers. The European Union is still quite segmented, and pan-European plays will rarely be successful. Yet, the world continues to flatten, and American brands can have success abroad with fewer hurdles as can international brands have success in the States.

Google has had success with other products abroad, most notably its Orkut social network which has bombed domestically to its MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn brethren, yet has taken off in huge countries such as India and Brazil. So, sure, Google should be sensitive to cultural sensitivities and will face different regulatory environments abroad, but the truth is that Google has been remarkably successful internationally in large part due to the international word-of-mouth generated by their product and feature set.