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.
Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and
Sergey Brin who were students in Stanford University’s Ph.D. program, the
Google search engine became popular due to the development and the application
of the new Algorithm called the PageRank™ algorithm which rendered the search
results based on the popularity or the importance of these page. The popularity
index was defined by the number of backlinks the page had. This was a
revolutionary breakthrough for Google and users found that the search results
from Google were helpful than from the other search engines at that time. Per
the Statistical Portal (statista) “In
2014, Google's ad revenue amounted to almost 59.06 billion US dollars. That
year, advertising accounted for 89.5 percent of the online company's total
revenues”. Though a major chunk of the revenue at Google is generated by
AdWords, It is also investing heavily in the non-Google websites and other
products such as sharing services, Cloud based services, Analytics etc.
Contrary to the other corporate
technology firms, the culture at Google is that it is relaxed, creative and
inspires diversity and a work ethic which compliments the Google motto of
“Don’t be evil”. The employees have access to free food, health club, fitness
classes, free haircuts etc. The business model at Google can be classified
broadly into B2B (Business to Business market) where most of the revenue is
generated from by having corporates display custom ads and also Google sells
its services like search, analytics and mapping tools to be integrated into the
existing infrastructure at the organizations. Under B2B model, Google has two
types of business models called as Manufacture/Direct Sales (Where company
sells and supports the product) and Value added reseller model (Where
authorized resellers offer the products along with installation and support
assistance). The other business model is the B2C (Business to Consumer) model
to offer attractive products to the end users who ultimately use the search
engine or App store to buy or use any of the advertised products and finally
B2G (Business to Government) model where the company promotes its products like
the search appliance, Calendar, document drive and reader etc. to big
government agencies and other corporates. This is a good strategy since the organizations
do not have to develop the software’s from scratch and thus saving millions of
dollars and since Google meets all the Federal Information Security Management
Act (FISMA) standards, the company is now eligible to bid for projects with
major government agencies.
However since it is now a huge
organization dealing with tons of user generated data, Google has had its fair
share of concerns with privacy, Anticompetitive and ethical issues. For
companies like Google and Facebook, Information is the currency in which they
trade. Google has been subjected to strict regulations in the European Union on
the matters of privacy. Since Google creates individual profiles based on the
internet habits and information available, it is therefore subjected to
stricter privacy rules. In 2006 Google had a conflict of ethics while operating
in China where as per the directive of the Chinese government, certain keywords
and websites were blocked. But later in 2009, Google experienced a series of
cyber-attacks which and after which the company started redirecting its
searches to its Hong Kong data center which served the search results without
any censorship. This resulted in a face-off with the Chinese government and
eventually Google had to cease operations in China albeit for a small part of
business run by non-google websites.
Like other big organizations, Google
has been charged with antitrust laws for uncompetitive behavior like predatory
pricing where most of the Google services are free as a long term strategy for
attracting customers who would eventually use it to buy products from the
partner websites. Some anticompetitive practices per Fairsearch.org (FairSearch, 2011) are deceptive display,
search manipulation, unfair treatment of advertisers etc. Google also had situations where its ethical
motto “Don’t be evil” has not always been followed like in the case of China,
Google street view. Ad pricing practices, copyright infringement in the case of
Google books where after a digitized copy of the book is loaded into the Google
library the original copy ceases to be available in the public domain. This is
to create a monopoly on the e-books and prevent other companies from creating
similar digital libraries.
Regardless of all these privacy and
ethical issues, the company is a tremendous success with a progress corporate
culture and an innovating mentality. The company is a pioneer in its field and
constantly thrives to bring new products to the market which are available for
free to the individual users and for a company which is still young, the
management of ethical, technology and business culture is relatively better
than similar organizations.