Executive Summary This report provides a comprehensive business analysis of Google as a company. Contents of this report will include; a comprehensive discussions on Google 's approach to value creation and how they maintain their competitive advantage in today 's markets, the current competitive situation of the company including their market environment, their current competition, and corporate business strategy. It will illustrate and explain the strategic framework of Google using such technics as, S.W.O.T analysis, Porter’s Five Forces, and a Pestle. Also included is the examination of the corporate culture within the company and how it reinforces Google’s current value creation strategy. Recommendations to improve the competitive position and the responsiveness to the business environment will also be discussed. Some topics discussed will be but not limited to; the re-alignments of current business structure, what changes that can be made to the corporate culture, and changes that can be made to the current business strategies.
Table of Contents
Executive Summary 1
Introduction 4
Relevant History 5
Company Description 6
Competitive advantage 7
Technology infrastructure 7
Innovative Services. 7
Market share. 8
Google’s Future Development 8
Current Competitive Situation Analysis 9
Environment. 9
Demographic trends. 9
Socio-cultural influences 9
Technological developments 9
The Competition 10
Corporate and Business Strategy: 10
Competitive position: 10
Strategic
A structure depends on the organization 's objectives and strategy. In a very centralized structure, the highest layer of management has most of the choice creating power and has tight management over departments and divisions. In a much suburbanized structure, the choice creating power is distributed and also the departments and divisions could have totally different degrees of independence. Wal-mart’s structure is built upon its risk management, safety and claims management process. Google Inc. has gained much attention and acclaim for its unusual organizational culture, which is designed to establish loyalty and creativity. Although both Google and Wal-mart focuses on risk management and they specialized on two different factors. Google focus more on creativity, loyalty and keeping its employees happy. Wal-mart tends to help customers by saving money, claims and promoting within the company.
Today, Google, Inc. is worth more than General Motors, McDonald's and Disney combined, and the company continues to model the way in the global technology industry in which it competes. In fact, the company's name has become a verb and it is common practice for consumers to "Google" what they want to find online. To determine how Google, Inc. reached this dazzling level of performance in a relatively short period of time, this paper provides an analysis of the three external environments in which Google competes, the general environment, the industry environment and the competitor environment. Next, a discussion of two specific strategic issues as well as opportunities and threats that are facing Google, Inc. is followed by a summary of the research and important findings in the conclusion.
Instead of social media, the Internet is also a kind of technology which benefits education by improving one’s knowledge through an easy access of information. Because of the advanced technology, the Internet has become a useful tool for education. In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, Larry Page who founded Google states, “Google is really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale” (5). There is no doubt that online search engines are as smart as human, or even smarter than us. Because of this, we tend to get help from the Internet to do our work. For example, students may surf the Internet for information and use the online calculator for solving mathematical problems. It is really a beneficial
Google Inc., American search engine company founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Google handled 70 percent of worldwide online search requests, placing it at the heart of most Internet users’ experience. Even though Google’s essential core business is search service, it now offers more than 50 percent Internet services and products from Gmail and online document creation to software for mobile phones and tablet computers. Google successfully maintained its core competence meanwhile expanded its business to advertisement and application three major core businesses. Its success in market levitates Google’s growth by acquiring other tech companies as a way of horizontal integration. For example, its 2012 acquisition of Motorola Mobility put it in the position to sell hardware in the form of mobile phones. Google’s broad product portfolio and size make it one of the top influential conglomerate companies in the high-tech market place. Google plays a very vital role in ICT ecosystem and it is one of the forces that enhance the growth of entire ICT ecosystem. For further illustrating the ICT ecosystem, I chose Apple and Comcast as device and Internet infrastructure firm to compare and contrast against Google.
Google Company is one of the global leaders in technology and in enabling people access information from the internet through their efficient search engines. Google immediately gained the attention of the internet sector for being a better search engine than its competitors (Wheelen, Hunger, Hoffman, & Bamford, 2015). This was after a tremendous effort in marketing their services and capturing a large market worldwide. However, there being so many risks and challenges in this line of business Google has had the urge to come up with new strategies so that they are able to overcome any challenge before them. The major problem that Google has
Google, Apple, Facebook and each have different business models. Each company focuses on different things that makes them unique and stand out to their customers.
Google’s total assets have steadily increased dating back from 2008 to 2012. Some key figures to point out in their assets are the slow growth between the second half of 2008
Competitor's Ratios and Analysis. Using relative comparative analysis (Table 6), competing firms Google and Amazon have unique performance over fiscal years (FY) 2014-2016. Measuring profit performance using profitability ratios, Google has a greater gross profit margin than Apple and retains an average of 61 cents for every dollar spent on direct sales. However, Apple outperforms Google on both return on assets and return on equity ratios. Meaning, Apple retains 14 cents for every dollar in assets in comparison to Google’s 11 cent retained average. In addition, Apple retains a net average of 35 cents for every dollar invested by common shareholders.
Google represents a company that has relied on innovation to drive success. Innovation is an essential part of the corporate culture (Nussbaum, 2011). The company has built its innovation capabilities on the eight pillars of innovation that help foster this practice and make it an integral part of the organizational culture (Wojcicki, n.d.).Gregersen and Dyer (2012) note that having innovative senior management is a critical component of having a strong innovative culture in an organization. The company fosters innovation by providing the resources (especially time) to its employees to pursue their own projects, trusting that these projects will be more creative than if the company directed the process centrally. This approach has delivered the company a stock price of $700 and an EPS of $31.92 (MSN Moneycentral, 2012).
For this research paper, I would like to select Google Inc. as a public company. This research paper would be helpful to prepare horizontal analysis of income statement and balance sheet of Google Inc. and to perform ration analysis to know the financial performance of the company.
(Goodman, 2009) The company primarily focuses on search; advertising; consumer content and platforms; and enterprise products. Some of the core business practices of google include getting to know their employees, creating new ways to reward and promote their high-performing employees, letting their employees own the problems they want to solve, allowing employees to function outside the company’s hierarchy, and have their employees’ performance reviewed by someone they respect for their objectivity and impartiality. (Manimala, M.J. 2013) The employees can operate and experience a free and transparent exchange of ideas in order to best meet the needs of the people in which they serve. Google technology includes the Google Chrome browser, YouTube, Google Maps, Android smartphones and smart contact lenses. The company is also developing a self-driving car. Overall, their managers trust them to carry out these responsibilities without micromanaging them and their core value is to create technology to make life easier and better for everyone.
Google is the most successful information technology and web search company in the world. It was founded in 1998 by two Stanford Ph.D. students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company name, Google, is a play on the word “googol” which is a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Larry Page and Sergey Brin chose this name to reflect the large amount of information on the web. The two created this search engine so that people can find anything on the web all in one place. The company’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Now, the company is far more than a search engine website, it has grown to be a substantial collection of products and services that are
As with its technology, Google has selected to ignore standard wisdom in designing its business. Google started with seed money from angel investors and brought together two venture capital firms that are competing to fund its first equity round. When the dotcom boom exploded, its competitors spent millions of dollars on marketing campaigns to “build brand,” but Google focused instead in quietly building a better search engine. The word rapidly extended from one satisfied use to another. With its google.com site where it has enhanced search technology and high volume of traffic, managers at Google recognized search services and advertising as two initial opportunities for generating revenue
Furthermore, because Google’s employees d are also equity holders, morale is high and Google encourages its employees to feel a part of Google’s success.
Following the success of Netscape and its web browser, Internet became a resource and communication platform idolized by many IT students in the universities. What started off as a hobby-cum-research[1] work by Jerry Yang (now Chief of Yahoo!) and David Filo (Co-founder of Yahoo!) for their Ph.D. dissertations; has evolved and became an Internet sensation over time. What they did was to compile all their favourite web links to form an online directory for easy navigation in the World Wide Web. The duo’s work immediately garnered a lot of attention from many surfers in the Internet world and before they realized it, Yahoo! became one of the most highly visited websites of all time. The duo saw the