Assignment 7 (MIS 2)

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?


Answers:

(image above is the google's business model)
source: http://www.davechaffey.com/E-commerce-Internet-marketing-case-studies/Google-case-study

1.Who are their competitors?

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 have had 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.

3. 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.

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.

source: http://technology.globalthoughtz.com/index.php/10-toughest-competitors-of-google-in-2010/

2&3. How have they used information technology to their advantage & How competitive are they in the market?

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.

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 come 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.

At this point, you might be screaming at me that I’m wrong, because Google does have external contracts, especially for serving up ads on other sites. But notice that 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 realms of the contract. Google is still free to develop how ever they want.

For almost everyone else, you’re going to have to create a product and then drive sales of that product or else sign a contract and then deliver a custom product to the customer. You’ll have external dependencies that will force an outside reality upon you that Google simply doesn’t have. You can argue that Google is dependent upon ads, but at this point Google has captured such a large share of that market and is steadily capturing more of it, that it really isn’t a dependency for Google. Sure, Google should probably diversify, just in case the ad market tanks, but at this point Google has so much money they can afford to take their time.

So now you see. It’s unlikely you or anyone else is going to emulate Google. Kiss that dream goodbye.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from Google. Copy the good things that Google does and adapt them to your business. What you shouldn’t do is force the practices of Google on your business simple because they are what Google does. Google is a product of a very specific evolution and your business will be the product of a different evolution.

And when your developers come to you and say that they want to be exactly like Google, you now have an argument to explain why your business can’t be exactly like Google.

Still, there’s nothing preventing you from being the next great company after Google. That prize is still there for the taking.

source: http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/03/17/googles-unique-advantage/

New Services...

Standalone applications

* AdWords Editor (Mac OS X, Windows 2000 SP3+/XP/Vista)

Desktop application to manage a Google AdWords account. The application allows users to make changes to their account and advertising campaigns before synchronising with the online service.

* Chrome (Windows XP/Vista/7, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X)

Web browser.

* Desktop (Mac OS X, Windows 2000 SP3+/XP/Vista,Linux )

Desktop search application, that indexes e-mails, documents, music, photos, chats, Web history and other files. It allows the installation of Google Gadgets.

* Earth (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows 2000/XP/Vista, iPhone)

Virtual globe that uses satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS over a 3D globe.

* Gmail/Google Notifier (Mac OS X, Windows 2000/XP)

Alerts the user of new messages in their Gmail account.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

Makes Them Unique...

"Google isn't a technology company, it is a Platform, and they happen to be the only player in the market. While they have "competitors" in almost every line of business they run, they don't "compete" with anyone yet because no one else has a comparable Platform: not Microsoft, not "Big Media", not even the US government as demonstrated by the slide detailing traffic statistics for Whitehouse.gov's Google Moderator. Google's investments in technology are less about the technology itself and more about leverage gained by participating in the ecosystem that has developed around the Google Platform."

source: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/05/googles-unique-position-and-im.html

How competitive they are in the market?
- In my own opinion google now is one highest and toughest competitor in the market. Everything we want to know about our assignments, any transactions, etc . we just google it. So for me, the word google now became a verb or an action word because people always say if they dont know the answer in a particular question, they just say "GOOGLE IT!" then person make move typing in the keyboard searching the answer. It is hard to live without google.