THE GOOGLE UNIVERSE

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.