GOOGLE INC. HARVARD BUSINESS CASE #9-806-105
INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND In December of 2005, six years after its founding and twenty-one months after the company went public, search engine giant Google, Inc. had grown into not just probably the world’s biggest and most successful Internet companies, but also one of America’s biggest business success stories. Founded by two Stanford graduate students, Google was in many ways the quintessential American business success story. Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google’s founders) infused their start-up with an innovative, entrepreneurial culture and established an organizational structure that supported innovation and risk taking. While Brin, Page and their fellow “Googlers” pursued the
…show more content…
An exception to this lack of government intervention on the Web has been government efforts to access Internet users’ private data (including surfing habits) under the terms of the Patriot Act. Google, along with Yahoo! and the other major search engines and web portals, are subject to considerable government pressures to release information about users. It should be noted that there are also now increasing signs that as technologies converge (e.g., the blending of telecommunications and Web communications) and as competitors cross into each others’ market territories (e.g., cable and phone companies becoming involved in Internet services through broadband products), more regulation of the Internet in the United States may be seen (Yang & Crocket, 2005, p. 38). Outside of the United States, the Internet regulatory environment is more restrictive. This is particularly true in emerging economies like China (where Google is anxious to establish a foothold). In most non-democratic foreign environments, Internet companies and Internet users must cope with massive government restrictions, including censorship and the surrender of private user data. In other markets where there is not necessarily direct government regulation or restriction, Google might find itself facing a certain amount of political backlash because of its status as an iconic
Google has run into many different issues in trying to expand itself internationally in an effort to increase its market share. Google has been viewed by many countries as a threat to their cultural values and norms. Many people feel that by allowing Google to have free reign in their countries will allow them to impose the Anglo-Saxon outlook on a variety of different topics, like history, pop-culture, and even fashion. Many European and Asian countries are combating Google a few different ways to ensure that their culture is not diluted by American society. The most popular by far has been the creation of a local search engine within the country, many times
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.
Currently Google faces major issues regarding its operation in China. Google has been faced with the decision to comply with Chinese government regulation and censor its search engine results or take on the human rights approach of freedom of speech and eliminate censorship of searched terms. This paper will examine the case study, Google in China, and answer the following questions: What advantages and disadvantages does Google have in the Chinese market in comparison with Baidu? What is the business model of each company? And what factors should Google have considered in reaching its decision on the new approach in China?
The Internet’s continuous advancement has produced the need for an on-going debate on whether or not the government should have the power to control the Internet. The idea of the government having control over what each country’s citizens can see on the Internet is also called Internet Censorship. Internet Censorship “is the control or suppression of the publishing of, or access to information on the Internet.” Internet Censorship varies from country to country depending on each country’s current usage and philosophy of how it should be used. (toptenreviews.com) Currently, there are ten countries including
Due to the increased competition from Yahoo and Microsoft, it has posed a great threat to Google Company. Entry of such like companies in the market has been relatively easy and even offering similar services to the consumers is no longer a problem as unlike a while back, technology has greatly improved. With an improvement in technology, creating sites that help people access information from the internet has been quite cheap and all it calls for is the creativity of a company. Google, however, has been able to remain at the top of the chart. They have been able to come up with a user-friendly search engine for their clients, one that is easy to understand as well as easy to use. Also, Google has been able to cut on cost as they are able to create web pages using UNIX web servers which are relatively cheap. This makes it possible for them to minimize the cost of input and hence maximizing their profit margins. This makes it possible for them to hire qualified personnel, offer quality services, advertise their products, and even offer promotions, helping them overcome the competition in the market structure.
The U.S. Government has turned the Internet into something it was never intended to be: a system for spying on us in our most private moments. Out of control government
Regulation of the Internet is a volatile topic. One reason comes from the very nature of the Internet. While not entirely different from
Google entered China in 2006 with high hopes of taking over the Chinese internet market. In order to become a major player for internet search engines in China, however, they had buckled and filtered search results according to the Chinese government. When Google.cn was launched, a loud public outcry over its giving in to the Chinese government on censoring and filtering search engine results, the company faced a communications crisis. Since Google had always been known for its free thinking, this seemed a vast contradiction. From a communications standpoint, Google’s greatest vulnerability in this crisis lay with a tarnished public image.
These days the internet has become an essential part to living for almost everyone but one of the controversial topics that people bring up is that whether or not the government should regulate information on the internet. Both sides have valid points which form a reasonable argument. Some people would say that they need to because of the dangers lurking around in the cyber world but the reasons for why the government shouldn’t regulate the Internet outnumber the reasons for why they should. The federal government should not regulate or censor information on the internet because doing so violates the first amendment and citizen’s right to privacy, degrades the educational value of the web, prevents the promotion and facilitation of
Since Google is a multination, it has numerous amounts of rule and regulations to abide by depending on the country’s laws and
Google. How could such a simple word mean so much? What is it? Google is a corporation, a search engine, and what some people describe as being a way of life. In fact, Google is the fourth most popular website visited in the world (Brin-Gale Biography). And in 2003 Google was at the top of the world as one of the most powerful businesses and presently still is (Page, Gale Biography). However, Google has done a lot more than dominating the Internet domain. Google has helped the world in a variety of ways. The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have affected the world through their education and upbringing, the creation of Google, and the project Google Green.
Search EnginesA search engine is a software system designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. This information is usually categorised into websites, images, videos and shopping results.Examples of search enginesGoogleGoogle is the world’s most popular website and uses many different algorithms to produce search results. BingBing is a search engine from Microsoft that comes as standard on Windows and Internet Explorer. DuckDuckGoDuckDuckGo is an alternative search engine which boasts privacy. There is no way to sign in and they do not track searches or users.Meta TagsMeta tags provide search engines with information about the site and specific pages. They are added to the <head> tag.The description attribute will allow the site owner to define the short description that shows under their search result on a search engine.The content attribute allows the site owner to define keywords so that when a customer searches for the keywords the retailer. The more keywords that match, the higher up the retailer is in the search results.Other ads are shown lower down as they did not bid as much.Google produces a list of shopping results. The companies also bid for spots hereThe top three search results are text advertisements. Sony has paid the most so they are on the top of the listFrom there, I clicked on one of the shopping results which took me to the product page. From there I can learn more about the product or pre-order it.CrawlersCrawlers (or Spiders) are the names
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
Google ranks just a notch below Microsoft Corporation at #3 on the Forbes most valuable brands. With a brand value of 65.6 Billion dollars, This Company is one of the biggest organizations in the technology domain. Google was primarily known for its internet search based offering, however the company has diversified in the recent years into offering a variety of products such as messaging (Gmail), blogs, videos (YouTube), mapping (Google Maps), Social networking, Operating systems (Open Handset Alliance), Readers, Cloud based services etc. which has enabled it to be become one of the market leaders in its segment.
Professionally, Google is known as a company based in California that is labeled as an internet company which is multi-national. It provides online searching, as well as cloud computing, software, and advertising. The company actually didn 't start off as a company, but rather as a research project back in 1996. The project was being conducted by Sergey Brin and Larry Page who at the time were studying at Standford University as PhD students. At the time, in internet-land, the search engines that existed operated where they ranked the results by counting the number of times keywords results were on a page. The two students came with a better idea (called PageRank at the time), that looked at relationship between websites. It would rank websites by determining it 's relevance, which was based on the importance of pages, and the number of pages, and how it linked back to the main website. After the idea 's creation, the two founders made the project into a business, and changed the name to "Google", which is a neat miss-spelling of the word "googol" which had significance because it stands for the number one followed by one hundred zeros, and it related to their goal because they wanted to create a search engine that offered a large quantity of information.