Google is a highly successful Internet business. Recently they have broadened their scope with a multitude of new tools. With Google I can do a lot of things already, i mean I could do everything now and satisfy all my needs and wants because of Google. And the no.1 product that I really love from them is the Google chrome, because it is more faster and easier to use. Since I used it, I can easily browse and surf already what I need because it is more faster in terms of loading some web stuffs compared to other browsers though I am just using a Dial-up Connection. Anyways, for you to know more about Google, just read the informations that are given below.
Google's Background
Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked back links to estimate the importance of a site. A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.
Later on, the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin named the search engine they built "Google," a play on the word "googol," the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name reflects the immense volume of information that exists, and the scope of Google's mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. A lot has changed since the first Google search engine appeared. They have grown and expanded their offerings from a single service to dozens, often in as many languages. They now have thousands of employees and offices around the world. But some things haven't changed: their dedication to their users and their belief in the possibilities of the Internet itself.
Google’s Philosophy
Ten things they know to be true as what they keep looking towards the future and these core principles guide their actions.
1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
2. it’s best to do one thing really, really well.
3. Fast is better than slow.
4. Democracy on the web works.
5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
7. There's always more information out there.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
10. Great just isn't good enough.
Google’s Culture
• Heart of Small Company
• Hand’s on contribution to the Products by each employee
• Flat Hierarchy
• Each employee having several responsibilities in different departments
• Hiring Policy
– Non Discriminatory
– Preference of ability over experience
• Multilingual company environment
• Multidomestic culture
• Recreation along with work
• Common café for all employees
Some of the new services/products they offered are the following:
1.Google Latitude - is a mobile geolocation tool that lets your friends know where you are via Google Maps.
2.GOOG-411- Google's directory assistance service, which can be used free of charge from any telephone in the US and Canada.
3.Google Public DNS - A publicly accessible DNS server ran by Google.
4.Google Chrome OS - An Operating System utilizing the Linux kernel and a custom Window manager.
5.Google Wave - a "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and much more.
Google’s Business Model
There's only one way to understand Google's business model, which is to understand that Google's services are not products. In fact, Google has only one product. And that product is you. Or, rather, us –all of us. Google makes billions of dollars in revenue each fiscal quarter. That money comes about by the same process that all companies use: They sell a product to their customers. Their customers pay money for that product.
Who's Google's customer? You? Really? When's the last time you paid Google for anything?
Advertisers are Google's customer. What do they sell to advertisers? They sell you. Or, at least, they rent you out, or provide access to you. They improve their product by improving you. That's where Google Latitude comes in. Latitude represents merely the latest in a long string of Google offerings designed to condition you for hard-core contextual advertising. With each new privacy-invading service, Google customers feel mild shock, followed later by acceptance.
Moreover, with regard to the Google business model, their market economy is focused on needs, since they are the corporation's bread and butter, the only source of reliable revenue and growth, and hence profit. Perhaps, the Gift Economy customers will be so delighted by Google's innovations that they will volunteer their time to identify and develop the next generation of applications. Open Source institutionalized.
Google has reached this level of success because their competitive advantage comes from its core competencies in computer hardware and software engineering which is IT. Google's great IT advantage among its competitors is its ability to build high-performance systems that are cost efficient and that scale to massive workloads. They have achieved this because of their unique philosophy and culture that their employees gladly embrace. They are focused on their mission which is making information “universally accessible and useful” while conforming their vision and ambition. According to IT consultant Stephen Arnold, Google's programmers are 50% to 100% more productive than their peers at other Web companies, a result of the custom libraries Google developed to support programming of massively parallel systems. He estimates the company's competitors have to spend four times as much to keep up.
What makes them unique?
One thing that has become evident that the Google is unique is that they grow in an organic fashion, unlike any other companies. 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 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 agile 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 beautiful.
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 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 realms of the contract. Google is still free to develop how ever they want.
10 Toughest Competitors of Google
Google is one such name in the Technology arena that is well poised to rule. Talking of past decade, it’s been all the way up for Google and undoubtedly they have been ruling the internet economy. Google have had its impact in the industry with more than 150 products and will continue to grow with its ever increasing portfolio of products. This is likely to happen but for these 10 companies which have poised some serious competition to Google.
1. Apple
Being from partners to rivals, Apple is one of the stringent opponents for Google in the year 2010. Today, Apple and Google have been locking their horns in the field of Smartphone, Mobile App Store, OS, Mobile Ad, and Online Music and so on. Likewise, Apple is more than up to the task of battling Google in these areas as well as browsers, where Google Chrome competes against Apple Safari. But battle between will intensify, as the market for the digital music and SmartPhones is all set for growth in 2010. Google’s music search along with its partner MySpace and Pandora are looking to compete with Apple’s iTunes, which was the No 1 music retailer in United States in 2009. Further, Google’s Android will have tough time as Apple’s iPhones continues to grab hold of the market all round the globe.
2. Microsoft
Microsoft is a company that has one of the most dominant impacts in the IT industry. So without a doubt it is Google’s biggest adversary in 2010 and these two giants will be locking their horns for market supremacy in areas such as search, collaboration tools and browsers. Talking of these two giants, Google has reigned as leaders in search, but with release of BING in May 2009, Microsoft has raised few questions amongst in Google’s management team. With features such as ranking search results based on relevancy to other users, Microsoft has inked Bing-related deals with Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo.Microsoft continued to enhance Bing, adding image search and mapping. But in response Google have unveiled real time search. In December, Google also added a photo search capability, a dictionary and a translator that finds relevant content in 40 languages. Entering 2010, Google still dominates search, with more than 70% of the market. Apart from search, the battle is likely to focus on cloud based collaboration tool.
Google Apps is designed to undercut sales of Microsoft products, including Exchange and SharePoint. Microsoft has responded with Office Web Apps, free Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that are due out in 2010. Last but not the least; the browser war between these two is giants are likely to heat up in 2010. So 2010 awaits the answer if ever so popular Microsoft’s premier browser’s market share could be brought down by Google’s Chrome.
3. Amazon
In 2009, Google’s effort of scanning millions of out-of-print books and incorporating them in online search did gain up some momentum and helped themselves to publish over 500000 digital books for free to customers of Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook, which is due in January. Further, there claims of opening up Google Editions, an e-book store, has opened up new rivalry with Amazon.
Amazon with its Kindle e-book reader is one of the leaders in e-book reader’s market. The other area where Google is taking on Amazon is in cloud computing. Google’s Apps Engine, a newbie cloud computing platform that allows developers to create their own Web applications and run them on Google’s infrastructure will be competing with Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) which has already grab hold of market with its several upgrade after its release in 2006. So it will be a great battle to watch when these two giants fight for market supremacy on Cloud computing and E-book readership.4. Facebook
Facebook, probably the most popular stuff in the internet right now, has attracted
350 million active users in just six years and is subject of interest for the guys at Google too. In 2010, Google and Facebook rivalry is likely to heat up based on question that where will people find there information in future in Search or Social Network? With ever increasing use of social networking and the rise of Facebook, Google’s worry seems to a viable one. So, in 2010 Google with its ORKUT will be in battle with Facebook.Orkut offers Google Friend Connect, a tool for Web publishers to add social networking content to their sites, in direct competition with similarly named Facebook Connect. Meanwhile, Facebook has sought out relationships with several arch-enemies of Google, including Microsoft and Yahoo. So its for sure that this battle is worth taking a note off in 2010.
5. Twitter
No doubt if Facebook is in rise, than it’s no difference with Twitter. If social networking is the way to go, then Google will certainly find Twitter in its way. Twitter, a micro-blogging site, has in a way revolutionized the way we communicate these days.
So, Google’s Friend Connect will face tough competitions for Twitter’s Connect in 2010 as Twitter looks to move up the rank in the areas of Social Networking. Other areas where these two find themselves competing are Real time search. Google’s real time search and Twitter’s will be trying to outperform each other in 2010. So, this battle will be a good one to watch for in 2010.
6. Mozilla
With release of Google Chrome, Google has stepped into ever so popular browse battle. Mozilla has been in the markets for years and now this step from Google is likely to create the conflict of interest between these two.
Of late the war between the two has heated up even more. The battle has now gone to default search. Mozilla now has shown intent to kick Google out from its default search engine status. The latest rumours on the internet show that Mozilla is now eyeing to get a deal with Microsoft to make Bing as its default search engine in Firefox.
This may not impact Google immediately but eventually this move, if comes true, is likely to decrease Google’s share of the search market. Hence, Google now has Mozilla on a double war zone; first the obvious browser war and now the war over default searches.
7. Yahoo
When it comes to search, one of Google’s biggest competitors besides Microsoft is Yahoo. Yahoo has been in the market with variety of products in areas of email, Messenger, News, Search and Analytics services. So without doubt it will be a fearsome competitor for Google. In 2009, Yahoo made some improvements in 2009 by integrating search with its rich content. Users can watch videos or stream music straight from the Yahoo search results page.
Yahoo also helps users find travel deals and compare product prices. Further, Yahoo has recently added Twitter to its search Page and if a joint search and advertising deal between Yahoo and Microsoft is approved by federal regulators. This could prove costly to Google so the 2010 is the year to watch as other competitor look to outperform Google in the market with different joint forces being formed by their rivals.
8. Cisco
Google definitely has a tough challenge against Cisco. With years of experience on web based collaborative platfomr, WebEx, and superior VOIP service, Cisco poses a threat to Google’s Wave and Voice. In addition to this, Cisco also is looking to enhance its video conferencing quality by focusing on collaboration through intenret video, desktop video and consumer Telepresence.
In addition to this, Cisco’s presence in Cloud is another leading edge it has over Google. As Google is looking to take everything to the web, it certainly will face a good competition from Cisco on this front.
Moreover, according to Networkworld, Cisco is looking to enter into Smartphone market in the very near future (actually by mid-2010). Its recent acquisition of Pure Digital and Flip shows Cisco’s intent to take video to the mobile phone. Thus, we might see Cisco giving a hard time to Google’s Nexus One in the coming days.
9. IBM
By now it’s quite crystal clear that 2010 will the year where big internet giants will be trying to gain whole lot of market share that will be up for grab in areas of collaboration tools. So, 2010 is likely to reopen Google’s rivalry with IBM with the release of new collaboration tools such as Google Wave. Google has stepped into the battle field with its low cost hosted collaboration tools such as Google Apps. Google will compete against IBM’s Lotus Lives, which has attracted more than 2 million businesses in the last two years.
10. Nokia
Today, Nokia has had grab hold of the mobile phone market with 4 out of 10 mobiles sold. With increase in use of smart phones, means the IT giants Google will be in rivalry with Nokia in periphery of operating systems for Smartphones. Symbian Open source operating system will be competing with Google’s Android. Nokia with recent deals with Microsoft is all set to bring Office Mobile to Symbian devices. With claim of releasing improved version of Symbian in 2010 means Google Android will have to face off tough battle. But, Google’s Android is poised for major developments in 2010 and with commitments from Acer, Sony Ericcson, HTC and Motorola this will be a worthwhile battle to watch in 2010 and years to come.
So, at this point one may feel Google has tough battle to fight in 2010. Most of the arch rivals are gearing up to poise serious threats either single handed or with collaboration. So, 10 line ups of interesting battle is all set to keep the 2010 interesting enough for us to watch and keep the Google on their toes.
Google will become what it has always wanted and intended to become, which is an advertising gatekeeper as indispensible as Microsoft is (or was) with Windows, Apple is with downloadable music or Amazon.com is with online book sales. But in order to get there, Google needs you to change. They need you to drop your resistance to being listened to, tracked and monitored at all times. They want you to be the best product you can possibly be. Google's customers will love you.
References:
http://technology.globalthoughtz.com/index.php/10-toughest-competitors-of-google-in-2010/
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/article.php/3801006/Googles-Business-Model-YOU-Are-the-Product.htm
http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/03/17/googles-unique-advantage/
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/10/16.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
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