In tradition people have needs, wants, and fun of nice-to-haves. In our needs we will pay its marketable value. Our wants, we will pay modestly for, especially if were bundled with needs. Nice-to-haves we will not pay for it at all, but we’ll take them. The 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.
Now there’s Google. In the progress and fast growth of technology, Google, in the other way around, fulfill people’s needs, wants, and nice-to-haves, and that’s all for free. At this point, we were divided into the leading side of they so called ‘digital divide’ who gratefully take all those three and never mind to differentiate them unless some of the nice-to-haves unduly complicate the application, in which case we don't want them and those on the other side of the ‘digital divide’ who get none of those three. The market understands none of this behavior, since it doesn't conform to any accepted business model. Google doesn't really seem to care either. They're too busy doing what they do so well - delighting customers with valuable, perceptive, boldly innovative and expansive new products, on a scale that is the envy of every entrepreneur.
GOOGLE, Inc.
Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. The Google headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009, the company has 20,164 full-time employees. Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, implying a value for the entire corporation of US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy and positive employee relations have been important tenets during the growth of Google. The company has been identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine's #1 Best Place to Work, and as the most powerful brand in the world (according to the Millward Brown Group). Google's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The unofficial company slogan, coined by former employee and Gmail's first engineer Paul Buchheit, is "Don't be evil". Criticism of Google includes concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, and censorship.
Google's Infrastructure:
The business concept of Google is similar to the concept and strategy where Dell has started, only adapting it for the Web & broadband. Instead of trucks and assembly plants, however, Google’s supply chain is made up of fiber networks, data centers, switches, servers and storage devices. Google has to deliver search as fast as possible at as low a cost as possible.
To simply understand its business model, here is the breakdown of its data inputs: Relevancy of results. Speed of search. Cost of executing a search query.
The company has to make sure that the speed of its search is really, really fast. Any random search on Google these days takes between 0.12 to 0.06 seconds or faster. It also makes perfect sense for Google to build their own servers, storage systems, Internet switches and perhaps, sometime in the future, even optical transport systems. Let’ s try to imagine connecting thousands of hosts (storage and server systems) at speeds of, say, 10 gigabits per second, in a manner that allows any-to-any connections. The sheer cost to keep such a beast going would suck up a major component of the infrastructure. A better option is to have gear that is customized for your processes, ones in which you have a major operational expenditure advantage. In the telecom bubble, large service providers were brought to their knees by operational expenditures. With the exception of optical systems, Google has built or is building the gear. It has been rumored to be a big buyer of dark fiber to connect its data centers. Building customized gear is an expensive strategy, but when you are the scale of Google, it starts to become less of an issue. Its because process-optimized infrastructure ensures that Google’s cost of executing a query keep going down.
In summary, Google’s gigantic infrastructure is the big barrier to entry for its rivals, and will remain so, as long as the company keeps spending billions on it. That said, there’s another thing Google could learn from Dell: Maintain the quality of your search results — customers will only put up with shoddiness for so long(Om Malik | Dec. 4, 2007).
Google's Direct Competitors :
1. Yahoo! Inc.
2. Pvt1 (MSN) – Privately held
3. AOL, Inc.
4. Industry (Internet Information Provider)
5. Disney Online
6. Move, Inc.
7. Match.com,LLC
8. Sina Corp.
9. Daum Communications Corp.
10. Joost (Joost is the new online distributor of Viacom’s property)
11. Etc.
Google's Unique Advantage:
The fact can't be denied. Google have achieved a massive success and almost every developer wants to work for. Google is best known for search and for ads associated with search, that was obvious. 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. And that's undeniably beautiful! Another thing is that 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 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 (Mark Mzyk | March 17, 2008). And i agree to this point that Google has its unique advantage.
Google's New Services:
1. New Storage Service
Google Inc has announced its very own cloud-based online storage service which will allow Google Docs users to upload any type of file of up to 250 MB while they will have access to a total storage capacity of 1GB.
(14 January, 2010, by Desire Athow)
2. Google Nexus One
Yesterday Google wasn’t in the business of selling mobile phones. Today, they are. The Nexus One smartphone has arrived and on sale at Google.com/phone.
(January 5th 2010 by Michael Arrington)
3. Google Click-to-Call (Billing) in Ads on Mobile Devices
Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.”
(Jan 5, 2010 at 7:59am ET by Greg Sterling)
4. Google Goggles
A new service that promises to make searching the internet as easy as taking a photo. The application, which will premier on Android devices, will let a user snap a photo of anything and then Google will deliver search results based on that image.
(December 7th, 2009 by Stefan Constantinescu)
5. Free DNS Service
Google just released their newest service which is public DNS. DNS is one of the most important services when it comes to using the internet. The main reason to use the service is reliability, speed and increased security. Google has put in other measures to help with overall security.
(December 5th 2009 by serverguy)
Sources/References:
http://searchengineland.com/google-to-introduce-click-to-call-billing-in-ads-on-mobile-devices-32831
http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/03/17/googles-unique-advantage/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/05/google-nexus-one-the-techcrunch-review/
http://www.serverninjas.com/free-dns-service-offered-by-google
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/co?s=GOOG
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/10/16.html
http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/1/14/microsoft-teases-google-over-new-storage-service/
Now there’s Google. In the progress and fast growth of technology, Google, in the other way around, fulfill people’s needs, wants, and nice-to-haves, and that’s all for free. At this point, we were divided into the leading side of they so called ‘digital divide’ who gratefully take all those three and never mind to differentiate them unless some of the nice-to-haves unduly complicate the application, in which case we don't want them and those on the other side of the ‘digital divide’ who get none of those three. The market understands none of this behavior, since it doesn't conform to any accepted business model. Google doesn't really seem to care either. They're too busy doing what they do so well - delighting customers with valuable, perceptive, boldly innovative and expansive new products, on a scale that is the envy of every entrepreneur.
GOOGLE, Inc.
Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. The Google headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009, the company has 20,164 full-time employees. Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, implying a value for the entire corporation of US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy and positive employee relations have been important tenets during the growth of Google. The company has been identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine's #1 Best Place to Work, and as the most powerful brand in the world (according to the Millward Brown Group). Google's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The unofficial company slogan, coined by former employee and Gmail's first engineer Paul Buchheit, is "Don't be evil". Criticism of Google includes concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, and censorship.
GOOGLE's REVOLUTIONARY BUSINESS MODEL
Google's Infrastructure:The business concept of Google is similar to the concept and strategy where Dell has started, only adapting it for the Web & broadband. Instead of trucks and assembly plants, however, Google’s supply chain is made up of fiber networks, data centers, switches, servers and storage devices. Google has to deliver search as fast as possible at as low a cost as possible.
To simply understand its business model, here is the breakdown of its data inputs: Relevancy of results. Speed of search. Cost of executing a search query.
The company has to make sure that the speed of its search is really, really fast. Any random search on Google these days takes between 0.12 to 0.06 seconds or faster. It also makes perfect sense for Google to build their own servers, storage systems, Internet switches and perhaps, sometime in the future, even optical transport systems. Let’ s try to imagine connecting thousands of hosts (storage and server systems) at speeds of, say, 10 gigabits per second, in a manner that allows any-to-any connections. The sheer cost to keep such a beast going would suck up a major component of the infrastructure. A better option is to have gear that is customized for your processes, ones in which you have a major operational expenditure advantage. In the telecom bubble, large service providers were brought to their knees by operational expenditures. With the exception of optical systems, Google has built or is building the gear. It has been rumored to be a big buyer of dark fiber to connect its data centers. Building customized gear is an expensive strategy, but when you are the scale of Google, it starts to become less of an issue. Its because process-optimized infrastructure ensures that Google’s cost of executing a query keep going down.
In summary, Google’s gigantic infrastructure is the big barrier to entry for its rivals, and will remain so, as long as the company keeps spending billions on it. That said, there’s another thing Google could learn from Dell: Maintain the quality of your search results — customers will only put up with shoddiness for so long(Om Malik | Dec. 4, 2007).
Google's Direct Competitors :
1. Yahoo! Inc.
2. Pvt1 (MSN) – Privately held
3. AOL, Inc.
4. Industry (Internet Information Provider)
5. Disney Online
6. Move, Inc.
7. Match.com,LLC
8. Sina Corp.
9. Daum Communications Corp.
10. Joost (Joost is the new online distributor of Viacom’s property)
11. Etc.
Google's Unique Advantage:
The fact can't be denied. Google have achieved a massive success and almost every developer wants to work for. Google is best known for search and for ads associated with search, that was obvious. 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. And that's undeniably beautiful! Another thing is that 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 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 (Mark Mzyk | March 17, 2008). And i agree to this point that Google has its unique advantage.
Google's New Services:
1. New Storage Service
Google Inc has announced its very own cloud-based online storage service which will allow Google Docs users to upload any type of file of up to 250 MB while they will have access to a total storage capacity of 1GB.
(14 January, 2010, by Desire Athow)
2. Google Nexus One
Yesterday Google wasn’t in the business of selling mobile phones. Today, they are. The Nexus One smartphone has arrived and on sale at Google.com/phone.
(January 5th 2010 by Michael Arrington)
3. Google Click-to-Call (Billing) in Ads on Mobile Devices
Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.”
(Jan 5, 2010 at 7:59am ET by Greg Sterling)
4. Google Goggles
A new service that promises to make searching the internet as easy as taking a photo. The application, which will premier on Android devices, will let a user snap a photo of anything and then Google will deliver search results based on that image.
(December 7th, 2009 by Stefan Constantinescu)
5. Free DNS Service
Google just released their newest service which is public DNS. DNS is one of the most important services when it comes to using the internet. The main reason to use the service is reliability, speed and increased security. Google has put in other measures to help with overall security.
(December 5th 2009 by serverguy)
Sources/References:
http://searchengineland.com/google-to-introduce-click-to-call-billing-in-ads-on-mobile-devices-32831
http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/03/17/googles-unique-advantage/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/05/google-nexus-one-the-techcrunch-review/
http://www.serverninjas.com/free-dns-service-offered-by-google
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/co?s=GOOG
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/10/16.html
http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/1/14/microsoft-teases-google-over-new-storage-service/
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