Assignment 7 (Due: January 30, 2010, before 01:00pm)

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:

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?



Solution:

1. Who are their competitors?

Google is one such name in the Technology arena that is well poised to rule. Talking of past decade, it’s been all the way up for Google and undoubtedly they have been ruling the internet economy. Google have had its impact in the industry with more than 150 products and will continue to grow with its ever increasing portfolio of products. This is likely to happen but for these 10 companies which have poised some serious competition to Google.


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.

Microsoft continued to enhance Bing, adding image search and mapping. But in response Google have unveiled real time search. In December, Google also added a photo search capability, a dictionary and a translator that finds relevant content in 40 languages. Entering 2010, Google still dominates search, with more than 70% of the market. Apart from search, the battle is likely to focus on cloud based collaboration tool.

Google Apps is designed to undercut sales of Microsoft products, including Exchange and SharePoint. Microsoft has responded with Office Web Apps, free Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that are due out in 2010. Last but not the least; the browser war between these two is giants are likely to heat up in 2010. So 2010 awaits the answer if ever so popular Microsoft’s premier browser’s market share could be brought down by Google’s Chrome.


3. Amazon

In 2009, Google’s effort of scanning millions of out-of-print books and incorporating them in online search did gain up some momentum and helped themselves to publish over 500000 digital books for free to customers of Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook, which is due in January. Further, there claims of opening up Google Editions, an e-book store, has opened up new rivalry with 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.

Orkut offers Google Friend Connect, a tool for Web publishers to add social networking content to their sites, in direct competition with similarly named Facebook Connect. Meanwhile, Facebook has sought out relationships with several arch-enemies of Google, including Microsoft and Yahoo. So its for sure that this battle is worth taking a note off in 2010.



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.



6. Mozilla

With release of Google Chrome, Google has stepped into ever so popular browse battle. Mozilla has been in the markets for years and now this step from Google is likely to create the conflict of interest between these two.

Of late the war between the two has heated up even more. The battle has now gone to default search. Mozilla now has shown intent to kick Google out from its default search engine status. The latest rumours on the internet show that Mozilla is now eyeing to get a deal with Microsoft to make Bing as its default search engine in Firefox.

This may not impact Google immediately but eventually this move, if comes true, is likely to decrease Google’s share of the search market. Hence, Google now has Mozilla on a double war zone; first the obvious browser war and now the war over default searches.



7. Yahoo

When it comes to search, one of Google’s biggest competitors besides Microsoft is Yahoo. Yahoo has been in the market with variety of products in areas of email, Messenger, News, Search and Analytics services. So without doubt it will be a fearsome competitor for Google. In 2009, Yahoo made some improvements in 2009 by integrating search with its rich content. Users can watch videos or stream music straight from the Yahoo search results page.

Yahoo also helps users find travel deals and compare product prices. Further, Yahoo has recently added Twitter to its search Page and if a joint search and advertising deal between Yahoo and Microsoft is approved by federal regulators. This could prove costly to Google so the 2010 is the year to watch as other competitor look to outperform Google in the market with different joint forces being formed by their rivals.



8. Cisco

Google definitely has a tough challenge against Cisco. With years of experience on web based collaborative platfomr, WebEx, and superior VOIP service, Cisco poses a threat to Google’s Wave and Voice. In addition to this, Cisco also is looking to enhance its video conferencing quality by focusing on collaboration through intenret video, desktop video and consumer Telepresence.

In addition to this, Cisco’s presence in Cloud is another leading edge it has over Google. As Google is looking to take everything to the web, it certainly will face a good competition from Cisco on this front.

Moreover, according to Networkworld, Cisco is looking to enter into Smartphone market in the very near future (actually by mid-2010). Its recent acquisition of Pure Digital and Flip shows Cisco’s intent to take video to the mobile phone. Thus, we might see Cisco giving a hard time to Google’s Nexus One in the coming days.



9. IBM

By now it’s quite crystal clear that 2010 will the year where big internet giants will be trying to gain whole lot of market share that will be up for grab in areas of collaboration tools. So, 2010 is likely to reopen Google’s rivalry with IBM with the release of new collaboration tools such as Google Wave. Google has stepped into the battle field with its low cost hosted collaboration tools such as Google Apps. Google will compete against IBM’s Lotus Lives, which has attracted more than 2 million businesses in the last two years.


10. Nokia

Today, Nokia has had grab hold of the mobile phone market with 4 out of 10 mobiles sold. With increase in use of smart phones, means the IT giants Google will be in rivalry with Nokia in periphery of operating systems for Smartphones. Symbian Open source operating system will be competing with Google’s Android. Nokia with recent deals with Microsoft is all set to bring Office Mobile to Symbian devices. With claim of releasing improved version of Symbian in 2010 means Google Android will have to face off tough battle. But, Google’s Android is poised for major developments in 2010 and with commitments from Acer, Sony Ericcson, HTC and Motorola this will be a worthwhile battle to watch in 2010 and years to come.

So, at this point one may feel Google has tough battle to fight in 2010. Most of the arch rivals are gearing up to poise serious threats either single handed or with collaboration. So, 10 line ups of interesting battle is all set to keep the 2010 interesting enough for us to watch and keep the Google on their toes.





2. How have they used information technology to their advantage?


Arguably the most popular search engine available today, Google is widely known for its
unparalleled search engine technology, embodied in the web page ranking algorithm, PageRanki
and running on an efficient distributed computer system. In fact, the verb “to Google” has
ingrained itself in the vernacular as a synonym of “[performing] a web search.”1 The key to
Google’s success has been its strategic use of both software and hardware information
technologies. The IT infrastructure behind the search engine includes huge storage databases
and numerous server farms to produce significant computational processing power. These
critical IT components are distributed across multiple independent computers that provide
parallel computing resources. This architecture has allowed Google’s business to reach a market
capital over $100 billion and become one of the most respected and admirable companies in the
world.

MARKET ENVIRONMENTS
Search Engine
Internet search engines were first developed in the early 1990s to facilitate the sharing of
information among researchers. The original effort to develop a tool for information search
occurred simultaneously across multiple universities is shown in Table 1. Although
functionalities of these systems were very limited, they provided the foundation for future webbased
search engines.


Search Industry
During the 1990s, the Internet experienced exponential growth with thousands of new web pages
being created daily. Online document search became the chief method of navigating the everexpanding
World Wide Web, as Internet users sought useful information among the largely
disorganized pages. As a result, the online search industry was born.
Early web-based search engine had roots in university-based research, with the exception of
AltaVista . WebCrawler was known as the first search engine to perform full-text web
search as opposed to searching library indices. In 1996, increased competition between search
engines triggered the search engine size wars, as the companies competed to index the largest
number of textual documents over the Internet. AltaVista was the first forefront search engine
winner, becoming the most successful and widely adored search engine in the mid 1990s.

The focus of information technology at Google for both software and hardware is speed and cost.
These two metrics are valued more than any other criteria such as reliability of machines or highperformance
enterprise computing hardware. Ultimately, the result must transform a response
time of user query using Google’s search engine to be completed within a one second time-frame.
Started in Larry Page’s dormitory room, the information technology at Google has transformed
into a full-blown large cluster PC network that functions similar to a computing grid.iv Even
though information technology infrastructure has changed dramatically over the years, the model
of IT use at Google has stayed the same. This model follows the original principles adopted by
the co-founders of building a prototype system that uses commodity hardware and intelligent
software. The shift of computer industry with PCs becoming commodity electronic hardware
over the years has worked in favor of Google’s IT strategy in getting the best cost performance
ratio (Patterson & Hennessy, 2004). Thus, instead of purchasing the latest microprocessors,
Google IT performs calculations to look for the best value of processing power per dollar and
purchasing many PCs that are only a few months old in the market, but at a much lower
discounted price. This is suitable for Google because the framework of their search engine is
built around parallelizing many user query requests across multiple machines and if more
processing is required, the system can simply increase more machines to serve even greater user
requests. The overall price per performance is more important than individual peak
performances, and this enables Google to achieve superior speed at a fraction of the cost rather
than using a few, but expensive high-end server systems. The end equation for Google’s IT in
selecting machines is calculated by the cost per query, and is derived by the sum of capital
expenses and operating costs divided by performance. For accuracy, the calculation takes into
inherent effects due to hardware depreciation and maintenance repairs. At the data centers, the
primary cost factor is capital expenditure credited to hardware, followed by personnel and
hosting costs.


3. How competitive are they in the market?


Google vs. Microsoft

Even as Microsoft won a victory recently against its new and increasingly agile young competitor Google in the case of Kai-Fu Lee, Google continues to nibble at the margins of Microsoft's more existential questions - the need for its software in the first place in an age when Web development architecture has taken the "Web 2.0" route offered by schemes like AJAX.

On the Lee case, Microsoft has said it wants the case to be decided in the state of Washington, where a judge ruled last month that the hiring can proceed, with the stipulation Kai-Fu Lee cannot recruit from Microsoft. Google is attempting to keep the case in California where non-compete agreements are said to be viewed with less rigidity.

Microsoft initially filed suit in Seattle's King County Superior Court in July, claiming Kai-Fu Lee violated that agreement when the search giant hired him. Google then countersued Microsoft in California, in an attempt to have the noncompete clause declared invalid.

The battle for Kai-Fu Lee, a former vice president with the software giant, underlines a growing animosity between the two companies, with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer allegedly pitching such a fit after losing one executive in 2004 that he threatened to "kill Google" over the continued poaching of Redmond's top brass, even flinging furniture and dropping more F-bombs than I've heard tell in awhile.

Well, Microsoft won its latest round in the fight that has at la

Well, Microsoft won its latest round in the fight that has at last made explicit the smoldering rivalr
ry between the tetween the two otherwise mostly indirect competitors.

But announcements between Google and Sun have indicated Google's interest in helping partners like Sun compete head to head with Microsoft in the office suite market with the recent release by Sun of OpenOffice.org 2.0 - a significant upgrade to the prior version which, if reviews are to be believed, is a virtual replacement (for free under the open source GPL) for MS-Office. According to Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president:

“OpenOffice.org is on a path toward being the most popular office suite the world has ever seen; providing users with safety, choice, and an opportunity to participate in one of the broadest community efforts the Internet has ever seen. As a member of that community, I’d like to offer my heartiest congratulations.”

For sure, it gives Sun a new lease on life after a very tough few years after being the dot in the dot-com crash. McNealy was in full effect with his "network is the computer" mantra, so much exemplified by Google's strategy. If you can call it that: Eric Schmidt, who used to work for Sun and is now Google's CEO (after jumping ship a few years ago from the sinking Novell) even mentioned how he delights in the absence of a strategy... well, I guess. No matter how underwhelming the actual announcement, it creates powerful symbolism in the marketplace where Microsoft has left an opening.

Still, OpenOffice.org has Microsoft running scared from OpenDocument - a revolutionary file format that could at last end the Word/Excel/PowerPoint tyranny even more than PDF has done. Which is why, perhaps, Microsoft licensed PDF support for next year's release of the the updated MS-Office suite. But their enthusiasm for SaaS (Software as a Service) is palpable amid McNealy’s remarks about Windows being the last, sad representative of the old client/server computing world and is ”so last millennium.”

Microsoft's reaction to the announcement took the move in stride, but the evidence lies in nothing less than Google's patents that they've got Microsoft squarely sighted in, as it "builds a patent fence" around search and takes on Yahoo first, then leveraging cutting edge user interface design technologies present in Google Maps (which could challenge PowerPoint) and Gmail (the RTF technology already offering about 70 percent of the functionality behind Word). Deployed on the "Googleplex" platform Google has created as its supercomputer-like infrastructure, calling into question Microsoft's very necessity isn't far around the corner.

Of course, Microsoft has seen such threats before - when Netscape challenged the idea that an OS was even necessary and applications could be run in Sun's Java within the browser. We all know how that ended... despite continuing market share battles with Mozilla Foundation's open source alternative to Internet Explorer (which I use myself), in Firefox.

But Redmond won't go down for the count easily. They've just reorganized decisively to take on such threats. And, while Microsoft might not have invented the idea of "embrace and extend"; they do seem to have perfected it.



4. What new services do they offer?

Our Experimental Fiber Network

Imagine sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging over the web and discussing a unique condition with a specialist in New York. Or downloading a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes. Or collaborating with classmates around the world while watching live 3-D video of a university lecture. Universal, ultra high-speed Internet access will make all this and more possible. We've urged the FCC to look at new and creative ways to get there in its National Broadband Plan – and today we're announcing an experiment of our own.

We're planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:

* Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it's creating new bandwidth-intensive "killer apps" and services, or other uses we can't yet imagine.
* New deployment techniques: We'll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we'll share key lessons learned with the world.
* Openness and choice: We'll operate an "open access" network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we'll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.

Like our WiFi network in Mountain View, the purpose of this project is to experiment and learn. Network providers are making real progress to expand and improve high-speed Internet access, but there's still more to be done. We don't think we have all the answers – but through our trial, we hope to make a meaningful contribution to the shared goal of delivering faster and better Internet for everyone.

As a first step, today we're putting out a request for information (RFI) to help identify interested communities. We welcome responses from local government, as well as members of the public.


5. What makes them so unique?

Google's Unique Advantage

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.


6. How competitive are they in the international market?



The assertion that Google has a lot to learn in its international efforts couldn't be more over-stated. Google has had success in the international environment, including greater market share than in the domestic market, that every Internet company would covet. This analysis delves deeper into Google's international efforts.

Having studied Google abroad somewhat significantly, I believe this article provides a very naïve view on Google’s success abroad. Absolutely, Google, as any American company, needs to be extremely aware of the impression they make when entering foreign grounds, as the risk as being seen as arrogant – the ugly American – is omnipresent. And, yes, Google should continue to grow their in-country teams significantly in order to best overcome cultural and sales hurdles and take advantage of unique opportunities and the gigantic world market that is growing at a quicker pace than the U.S. market. Recent stats point to European e-commerce in a position to surge past U.S. e-commerce.

Yet, don’t attempt to fool anyone here: Google has enormous international market share. Though I’m on a plane and not able to access these stats immediately, I believe that Google has approximately a 10-point higher share of search in Europe than they do in the States. I attended an online and multi-channel retail conference in London earlier this year, and Google was constantly mentioned, and never in a bad light. I am attempting to arrange a dinner in Paris later this year or early next with top French e-commerce companies, and Google is the likely sponsor, due to their relationship with the French agency that I am in contact with and their relationship with the likely invitees. Google is dominant in most countries, with their distant following to Baidu in China and the Russian example in the article notable exceptions.

In the UK, Amazon.com and eBay have also taken off after some early slips and command a dominant share of the market. Of course, they face hurdles, most notably eBay’s fraud and trust problem, but these American brands have also experienced tremendous success abroad. And there are other huge hurdles across Europe, such as Germany’s reliance on non-credit card payments and their language and cultural barriers. The European Union is still quite segmented, and pan-European plays will rarely be successful. Yet, the world continues to flatten, and American brands can have success abroad with fewer hurdles as can international brands have success in the States.

Google has had success with other products abroad, most notably its Orkut social network which has bombed domestically to its MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn brethren, yet has taken off in huge countries such as India and Brazil. So, sure, Google should be sensitive to cultural sensitivities and will face different regulatory environments abroad, but the truth is that Google has been remarkably successful internationally in large part due to the international word-of-mouth generated by their product and feature set.

The biggest and most reliant search engine used by almost all of the computer related people all over the world is google. If there is a project, videos, photos, application and everything under the sun that you want to know just google it!

Google is a multinational public cloud computing and Internet search technologies corporation. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program.The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the "Google Guys", while the two were attending Stanford University as Ph.D. candidates. It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, with its initial public offering to follow on August 19, 2004. The company's stated mission from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful",and the company's unofficial slogan – coined by Google engineer Paul Buchheit – is Don't be evil. In 2006, the company moved to their current headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world, and processes over one billion search requests and twenty petabytes of user-generated data every day. Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond the company's core search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail e-mail software, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. More notably, Google created the Android mobile phone operating system, used on a number of HTC phones such as the Nexus One and Droid Eris. Because of its popularity and numerous products, Alexa lists Google as the Internet's most visited website. Google is also Fortune Magazine's fourth best place to work, and BrandZ's most powerful brand in the world. However, the company has also faced criticism over issues relating to the privacy of personal information, copyright, and censorship.

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
11. other companies with the same forte as google

WHAT MAKES GOOGLE UNIQUE?

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.

NEW SERVICES OFFERED:

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)

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
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/

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?


Google is one such name in the Technology arena that is well poised to rule. Talking of past decade, it’s been all the way up for Google and undoubtedly they have been ruling the internet economy. Google have had its impact in the industry with more than 150 products and will continue to grow with its ever increasing portfolio of products. This is likely to happen but for these 10 companies which have poised some serious competition to Google.

Question 1: The 10 toughest competitors of google in the year 2010 are:


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. Microsoft continued to enhance Bing, adding image search and mapping. But in response Google have unveiled real time search. In December, Google also added a photo search capability, a dictionary and a translator that finds relevant content in 40 languages. Entering 2010, Google still dominates search, with more than 70% of the market. Apart from search, the battle is likely to focus on cloud based collaboration tool. Google Apps is designed to undercut sales of Microsoft products, including Exchange and SharePoint. Microsoft has responded with Office Web Apps, free Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that are due out in 2010. Last but not the least; the browser war between these two is giants are likely to heat up in 2010. So 2010 awaits the answer if ever so popular Microsoft’s premier browser’s market share could be brought down by Google’s Chrome.

3.)Amazon

In 2009, Google’s effort of scanning millions of out-of-print books and incorporating them in online search did gain up some momentum and helped themselves to publish over 500000 digital books for free to customers of Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook, which is due in January. Further, there claims of opening up Google Editions, an e-book store, has opened up new rivalry with 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. Orkut offers Google Friend Connect, a tool for Web publishers to add social networking content to their sites, in direct competition with similarly named Facebook Connect. Meanwhile, Facebook has sought out relationships with several arch-enemies of Google, including Microsoft and Yahoo. So its for sure that this battle is worth taking a note off in 2010.

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.

6.)Mozila

With release of Google Chrome, Google has stepped into ever so popular browse battle. Mozilla has been in the markets for years and now this step from Google is likely to create the conflict of interest between these two. Of late the war between the two has heated up even more. The battle has now gone to default search. Mozilla now has shown intent to kick Google out from its default search engine status. The latest rumours on the internet show that Mozilla is now eyeing to get a deal with Microsoft to make Bing as its default search engine in Firefox. This may not impact Google immediately but eventually this move, if comes true, is likely to decrease Google’s share of the search market. Hence, Google now has Mozilla on a double war zone; first the obvious browser war and now the war over default searches.

7.)Yahoo

When it comes to search, one of Google’s biggest competitors besides Microsoft is Yahoo. Yahoo has been in the market with variety of products in areas of email, Messenger, News, Search and Analytics services. So without doubt it will be a fearsome competitor for Google. In 2009, Yahoo made some improvements in 2009 by integrating search with its rich content. Users can watch videos or stream music straight from the Yahoo search results page. Yahoo also helps users find travel deals and compare product prices. Further, Yahoo has recently added Twitter to its search Page and if a joint search and advertising deal between Yahoo and Microsoft is approved by federal regulators. This could prove costly to Google so the 2010 is the year to watch as other competitor look to outperform Google in the market with different joint forces being formed by their rivals.

8.)Cisco

Google definitely has a tough challenge against Cisco. With years of experience on web based collaborative platfomr, WebEx, and superior VOIP service, Cisco poses a threat to Google’s Wave and Voice. In addition to this, Cisco also is looking to enhance its video conferencing quality by focusing on collaboration through intenret video, desktop video and consumer Telepresence. In addition to this, Cisco’s presence in Cloud is another leading edge it has over Google. As Google is looking to take everything to the web, it certainly will face a good competition from Cisco on this front. Moreover, according to Networkworld, Cisco is looking to enter into Smartphone market in the very near future (actually by mid-2010). Its recent acquisition of Pure Digital and Flip shows Cisco’s intent to take video to the mobile phone. Thus, we might see Cisco giving a hard time to Google’s Nexus One in the coming days.

9.)IBM

By now it’s quite crystal clear that 2010 will the year where big internet giants will be trying to gain whole lot of market share that will be up for grab in areas of collaboration tools. So, 2010 is likely to reopen Google’s rivalry with IBM with the release of new collaboration tools such as Google Wave. Google has stepped into the battle field with its low cost hosted collaboration tools such as Google Apps. Google will compete against IBM’s Lotus Lives, which has attracted more than 2 million businesses in the last two years.

10.)Nokia

Today, Nokia has had grab hold of the mobile phone market with 4 out of 10 mobiles sold. With increase in use of smart phones, means the IT giants Google will be in rivalry with Nokia in periphery of operating systems for Smartphones. Symbian Open source operating system will be competing with Google’s Android. Nokia with recent deals with Microsoft is all set to bring Office Mobile to Symbian devices. With claim of releasing improved version of Symbian in 2010 means Google Android will have to face off tough battle. But, Google’s Android is poised for major developments in 2010 and with commitments from Acer, Sony Ericcson, HTC and Motorola this will be a worthwhile battle to watch in 2010 and years to come. So, at this point one may feel Google has tough battle to fight in 2010. Most of the arch rivals are gearing up to poise serious threats either single handed or with collaboration. So, 10 line ups of interesting battle is all set to keep the 2010 interesting enough for us to watch and keep the Google on their toes.

"Instead of trucks and assembly plants, however, Google’s supply chain is made up of fiber networks, data centers, switches, servers and storage devices. From that perspective, its business model is no different than that of Dell’s (DELL): Google has to deliver search results (information, if you want to be generous about their other projects) as fast as possible at as low a cost as possible.

...to better understand Google and its business model, lets should think how their business grow bigger and bigger.. there are 3 things needs to be understand why Google is the number 1 search engine nowadays are:

First: Relevancy of Results
Second: Speed of Search
Third: Cost of Executing a Search Query

While their results aren’t optimal, they are good enough. Just like Microsoft Windows was good enough to dominate the market. Google, according to Hitwise, now has 64 percent of the total search market. And although a typical Google query can often be an act of futility, we put up with it because the results are fast. If they’re wrong, we can just start all over again.

The faster the results show up on our browsers, the less inclined we’ll be to switch to a rival search engine, no matter how great the rival’s search methodology may be. The faster (and more efficient) its infrastructure, the more easily Google can keep serving the ad-based money machine.

In other words, 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. Now that is really, really fast. Google does this by indexing the Internet quite well. The magic is in delivering the search results from this index at lightening speed, and that requires an infrastructure — oodles of bandwidth and specialized hardware — that is finely tuned, much like a Formula One Car.

Against this backdrop, it 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 me rephrase that: 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 number of racks, fiber, routers and everything in between is mind-boggling. If this system were built using gear from established hardware makers, it would take a superhuman effort to make it all work together. In other words, 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." -By Om Malik

...how Google grow... and grow...?
"Its performance is the envy of executives and engineers around the world ... For techno-evangelists, Google is a marvel of Web brilliance ... For Wall Street, it may be the IPO that changes everything (again) ... But Google is also a case study in savvy management -- a company filled with cutting-edge ideas, rigorous accountability, and relentless attention to detail ... Here's a search for the growth secrets of one of the world's most exciting young companies -- a company from which every company can learn." -By: Keith H. Hammonds

What is Googles competitive advantage? Is Googles information technology so superior to other search engines that it gives them a competitive advantage, and is this a sustainable competitive advantage? Is it possible for IT (information technology) to provide a sustainable competitive advantage at all?

"Google's advantage is more of a company philosophy than a technical advantage. Thus far they have simply remembered what works on the Internet. Some history. Back in the days of Yore, (lets see that was a whole 8 years ago maybe), search engines weren't very good. They were better than nothing, but trying to find things took quite a bit of skill or a large sense of humor. You could put in a query and almost anything would come up, and that anything would number in the 10,000's. A Researcher on the web could use plus and minus signs, quotes and AND OR logic to wade through the results, getting a bit better listings for his query, but for the average user, it was still a mess. META keyword tags were then used, because the thought was "You know what your page is about, so you tell us" and that worked a little better for a while until the marketing people got a hold of the idea. Any marketing person will tell you that it is better to have your company name show up as much as possible, than to only show up when it's relevant. "Keep your product in view" is the thought there, so webmasters started putting all kinds of keywords in their META tags, and descriptions. Not based on the contents of the page but on the popularity of the keywords used for searches. So, if we were a Webmaster back then, we would change our keywords to include "sniper, the ring, bob crane, Halloween costume ideas, world series tickets". And thus have a chance to show up more often. This helps us, but of course it doesn't help the search engines or the users of those search engines very much. The late 1990's showed that businesses didn't care if helped the search engines at all, because this type of marketing was rampant.
About this same time Portals such as AOL and MSN decided that if a company or website wanted to show up on top, they would have to pay for that privilege. This was rather profitable for them, but again, not the users of the search engines, who wanted the most accurate pages for their search, not the most profitable results for AOL and
MSN. Pages called MetaEngines began to show up, such as dogpile.com, which produced the top 20-30 results from several search engines and these became popular for while, because at least they were different results most of the time, and the top listings. While not perfect still, it better than using the single search engines. Then Google showed up. Google doesn't use META keywords and doesn't have "Pay for Placement", what they do is Rank a Page, and index the entire page looking for keyword sets, giving it a Page Relevance. Basically they took the opposite view of all the other engines, they decided the searcher was the driving force of what a page has on it, not the owner of the page. And that's what I mean by "they remembered what works on the Internet". Most people want information when they come to an Internet Search Engine. At this point in time, information is best shown in text, not pictures or sound. So if a page doesn't have any text on it, or has less than 300 words, it's probably not a page someone is looking for.
The averages are high anyway. You can read about Page Ranking at on these pages. " -Answered By: webadept-ga on 29 Oct 2002 10:58 PST

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:


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.

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:

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?


Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud. More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves.

In recent years, many talented software providers have embraced the cloud and delivered a diverse set of features capable of powering almost any business. But too often, customers who adopt applications from multiple vendors end up with a fractured experience, where each particular application exists in its own silo. Users are often forced to create and remember multiple passwords, cut and paste data between applications, and jump between multiple interfaces just to complete a simple task.

Today, Google makes it easier for the users and software providers to do business in the cloud with a new online store for integrated business applications. The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses, including:

• Intuit Online Payroll: A small business application that offers business owners a new way to efficiently run payroll, pay taxes and let employees check paystubs all within one integrated online office environment.

• Manymoon: The company's free work and project management application for Google Apps makes it simple for businesses and teams to organize and share information including tasks, projects, documents, status updates and links with co-workers, customers and partners.

• Professional Services Connect (PS Connect): This new cloud-based offering coming soon from Appirio, pulls contextually relevant information on people, projects, customers and transactions from a user's domain and surfaces it directly inside a Gmail message so services professionals can make more informed, real-time decisions.

• JIRA Studio: A hosted software development suite from Atlassian enables software developers to flow naturally between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other design and development tools in order to better track and manage project issues and workflow.

Once installed to a company's domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each. The Google Apps Marketplace eliminates the worry about software updates, keeping track of different passwords and manual syncing and sharing of data, thereby increasing business productivity and lessening frustrations for users and IT administrators alike. That's the power of the cloud.


GOOGLE ADVANTAGES:

* PAGE RANK - PageRank' is to Google, as the ‘secret formula' to Coke Cola. Named after its co-founder, Larry Page, PageRank is essentially an algorithmic formula that examines the entire link structure of the web and subsequently determines which pages are more important.

Page's theory was based on the notion that ‘all links were not created equal'. Some mattered more than others; greater influence would be granted to incoming links from important sites. Page decided that sites with more links pointing to them were more important than sites with fewer links.

For example, if the popular yahoo homepage linked to an Internet site, that site instantly became more important (relevant). The speed of Google has also been a key factor in its success. If printed out, the Google database would amount to a stack of paper around 200 kilometers high. The Google search engine can pull any word out of that stack in less than half a second.

April 4, 2004
The Secret Source of Google's Power

by skrenta at 2:11 PM
Much is being written about Gmail, Google's new free webmail system. There's something deeper to learn about Google from this product than the initial reaction to the product features, however. Ignore for a moment the observations about Google leapfrogging their competitors with more user value and a new feature or two. Or Google diversifying away from search into other applications; they've been doing that for a while. Or the privacy red herring.

No, the story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else.

I've written before about Google's snippet service, which required that they store the entire web in RAM. All so they could generate a slightly better page excerpt than other search engines.

Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.

Speculation: Gmail's Architecture and Economics

Let's make some guesses about how one might build a Gmail.

Hotmail has 60 million users. Gmail's design should be comparable, and should scale to 100 million users. It will only have to support a couple of million in the first year though.

The most obvious challenge is the storage. You can't lose people's email, and you don't want to ever be down, so data has to be replicated. RAID is no good; when a disk fails, a human needs to replace the bad disk, or there is risk of data loss if more disks fail. One imagines the old ENIAC technician running up and down the isles of Google's data center with a shopping cart full of spare disk drives instead of vacuum tubes. RAID also requires more expensive hardware -- at least the hot swap drive trays. And RAID doesn't handle high availability at the server level anyway.

No. Google has 100,000 servers. [nytimes] If a server/disk dies, they leave it dead in the rack, to be reclaimed/replaced later. Hardware failures need to be instantly routed around by software.

Google has built their own distributed, fault-tolerant, petabyte filesystem, the Google Filesystem. This is ideal for the job. Say GFS replicates user email in three places; if a disk or a server dies, GFS can automatically make a new copy from one of the remaining two. Compress the email for a 3:1 storage win, then store user's email in three locations, and their raw storage need is approximately equivalent to the user's mail size.

The Gmail servers wouldn't be top-heavy with lots of disk. They need the CPU for indexing and page view serving anyway. No fancy RAID card or hot-swap trays, just 1-2 disks per 1U server.

It's straightforward to spreadsheet out the economics of the service, taking into account average storage per user, cost of the servers, and monetization per user per year. Google apparently puts the operational cost of storage at $2 per gigabyte. My napkin math comes up with numbers in the same ballpark. I would assume the yearly monetized value of a webmail user to be in the $1-10 range.

Cheap Hardware

Here's an anecdote to illustrate how far Google's cultural approach to hardware cost is different from the norm, and what it means as a component of their competitive advantage.

In a previous job I specified 40 moderately-priced servers to run a new internet search site we were developing. The ops team overrode me; they wanted 6 more expensive servers, since they said it would be easier to manage 6 machines than 40.

What this does is raise the cost of a CPU second. We had engineers that could imagine algorithms that would give marginally better search results, but if the algorithm was 10 times slower than the current code, ops would have to add 10X the number of machines to the datacenter. If you've already got $20 million invested in a modest collection of Suns, going 10X to run some fancier code is not an option.

Google has 100,000 servers.

Any sane ops person would rather go with a fancy $5000 server than a bare $500 motherboard plus disks sitting exposed on a tray. But that's a 10X difference to the cost of a CPU cycle. And this frees up the algorithm designers to invent better stuff.

Without cheap CPU cycles, the coders won't even consider algorithms that the Google guys are deploying. They're just too expensive to run.

Google doesn't deploy bare motherboards on exposed trays anymore; they're on at least the fourth iteration of their cheap hardware platform. Google now has an institutional competence building and maintaining servers that cost a lot less than the servers everyone else is using. And they do it with fewer people.

Think of the little internal factory they must have to deploy servers, and the level of automation needed to run that many boxes. Either network boot or a production line to pre-install disk images. Servers that self-configure on boot to determine their network config and load the latest rev of the software they'll be running. Normal datacenter ops practices don't scale to what Google has.
What are all those OS Researchers doing at Google?

Rob Pike has gone to Google. Yes, that Rob Pike -- the OS researcher, the member of the original Unix team from Bell Labs. This guy isn't just some labs hood ornament; he writes code, lots of it. Big chunks of whole new operating systems like Plan 9.

Look at the depth of the research background of the Google employees in OS, networking, and distributed systems. Compiler Optimization. Thread migration. Distributed shared memory.

I'm a sucker for cool OS research. Browsing papers from Google employees about distributed systems, thread migration, network shared memory, GFS, makes me feel like a kid in Tomorrowland wondering when we're going to Mars. Wouldn't it be great, as an engineer, to have production versions of all this great research.

Google engineers do!

Competitive Advantage

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?


COMPETITORS:

Major Competitors

Google's major competitors are Yahoo! Inc and Microsoft Corporation.
[edit] Yahoo! Inc.
[edit] Introduction to Yahoo! Inc.

(from Wikipedia)

Yahoo! Inc. NASDAQ: YHOO is an American computer services company with a mission to "be the most essential global Internet service for consumers and businesses". It operates an Internet portal, the Yahoo! Directory and a host of other services including the popular Yahoo! Mail. It was founded by Stanford graduate students David Filo and Jerry Yang in January 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

According to Alexa Internet and Netcraft, both of which are Web trends companies, Yahoo! is the most visited website on the Internet today. The global network of Yahoo! websites received 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2005.
[edit] Microsoft Corporation
[edit] Introduction to Microsoft Corporation

(from Wikipedia)

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKEx: 4338) is the world's largest software corporation, with 2005 global annual sales of close to $40 billion USD and about 64,000 employees in 85 countries and regions. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. Its most popular products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software, each of which has achieved near ubiquity in the desktop computer market. Microsoft possesses footholds in other markets, with assets such as the MSNBC cable television network, the MSN Internet portal, and the Microsoft Encarta multimedia encyclopedia. The company also markets home entertainment products, such as the Xbox and MSN TV.
[edit] Microsoft's core business

Although Microsoft also involves in different fields like online search engine market(www.msn.com), instant messaging(MSN messenger), gaming industry(X-Box) and TV network(MSNBC) etc, its core business is still focused on software manufacture. Its dominance of operating system and office software contributes most to its huge profit.

America Online, or AOL for short, is a U.S.-based online service provider, Internet service provider, and media company operated by Time Warner. Based in Dulles, Virginia, a community in Loudoun County, Virginia, with regional branches around the world, it is by far the most successful proprietary online service, with more than 32 million subscribers at one point in the US, Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Latin America (declared bankrupt in 2004), Japan and formerly Russia.

Due to the new development of braod band network technology, AOL's number of subscribers is shrinking. Therefore, AOL successfully launched a Broadban program to maintain its members.According to Searchenginewatch.com, AOL Search still occupies about 6.9% of search engine market share. Furthermore, Google has purchased 5% of AOL's stock and built a partnership with AOL.

Due to Google's stock purchase and partnership with AOL, AOL is no longer considered as a major competitor for Google.
[edit] AOL's core business

Generally speaking AOL is an internet service provider which used to be specialized in dial-up internect access service. And AOL Search is also considered as one of its core businesses.
[edit] Baidu
[edit] Introduction to Baidu

Baidu (ç¾åº¦) NASDAQ: BIDU is a popular Chinese search engine. Its design resembles that of Google and features the capability to search news and images, among other functionalities. Baidu claims itself the biggest search engine in Chinese language. As of December 2005, it is the fourth most visited site on the Internet. Baidu translates to "hundreds of times" in English. There have been reports lately that Baidu's leadership in the Chinese language search engine industry is losing its share to Google.

The most popular feature about Baidu that it supports MP3 search. This is very similar with the image search of Google, however, it searches for MP3/WMA/SWF files instead of image files. The MP3 search are mainly used for Chinese Pop Music, and the search results are surprisingly accurate. Though it's illegal in most of the world, Baidu can do this as the Chinese law doesn't prohibit putting music on the internet, and Baidu is under Chinese law.

As Google launched its Google.cn Chinese search engine, the competition between the current No.1 Chinese search engine and the World No.1 search engine is just getting started.

NEW OFFERS:

Google has introduced a new product to browse news that will share advertising revenue with participating publishers. Fast Flip displays news stories from different partner publications via screenshots of the articles, which the user can quickly flick through.

Fast Flip essentially allows readers to browse news faster, and more visually. The 39 news partners currently listed include the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, Techcrunch, Slate, the Daily Beast, ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting and The Atlantic. The homepage shows screenshots of articles displayed in horizontal rows sorted by recent, most popular, etc, or by section (such as finance, sport) or by topics, which are generated automatically by rising stories in the news. Clicking on any of the small screenshots jumps to a larger version of that specific story, and users can click on arrows to swiftly sift through other stories.

The individual screenshot allows the reader to read a considerable chunk of the article and there is advertising space alongside. Clicking on this larger screenshot takes to you the publisher's site, and links above the picture offer access to other stories from that publication. According to the Guardian, the new services focuses on features, opinion and other longer articles, but it is not clear how what criteria Google's algorithm uses to choose pieces.

Google News is offering a new Image View that displays photos linked to news items with scrolling headlines in a column on the right.

"In looking at how people use Google News and based on feedback we've received, we've found that many people prefer to read the news in a more visual way," the company wrote in the Google News Blog. "The Image Version of News lets you view and explore the top headlines of the day through photos instead of just text."

Mousing over an image displays a summary of the news item and the link to it on the right side. You can still use the standard version, which contains smaller thumbnails next to news items, or a text version without images.

As Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker put it, "Google News Image Version allows users a better way to 'see' the news. And sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words."

REFERENCES:

http://blog.topix.com/archives/000016.html
http://scenariothinking.org/wiki/index.php/Who_are_Google%27_s_competitors_%28Core_Business_and_General%29%3F
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9735885-7.html
http://www.dailyfinance.com/company/google-inc/goog/nas/top-competitors
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

Subject: Assignment 7 (Due: January 30, 2010, before 01:00pm) Today at 12:33 am
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:

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?

Explain Google’s business model.

Google have combined software innovation with a brand new Internet business model. So basically the key to Google’s success has been and probably always will be the fact that they know how to make money without being evil. That is the part of their business model. Everyone is happy, while Google is making millions from the advertising links they put up, the owners of those links know that people are going to their websites, and the users get to enjoy a free powerful search engine which gives them the information that they want in a short amount of time and in an accurate way.

Not only is Google easy to use and fair to the public but it is also very fast. It only takes a fraction of a second to get the information that you need. Google has worked very hard on getting rid of excess bit and byte from their pages to make it go as fast as it possibly can, it has been breaking its own speed records. While other companies thought large servers would be the quickest way to deal with huge amounts of data Google realized that networked PCs were faster. While other search engines stuck with the speed limits for the search algorithms Google developed new algorithms which proved there was no limit as to how fast you could go. Google still is trying to make it faster.


1. Who are their competitors?

Yahoo Vs. Google
Yahoo and Google are battling over the same Web visitors and advertising dollars. There currently is an $8 billion global search advertising business, which is expected to rise to $22 billion in five years, according to Piper Jaffray. Worldwide online brand advertising is expected to increase twenty one percent this year from $11.3 billion to $18.2 billion, according to Goldman Sachs. These two companies are using very different approaches while going after the same advertising dollars. Yahoo uses human editors or “surfers” to organize web sites into categories. However humans cannot index everything so they are partnered up with a third party search engine to provide answers when its human – powered listing do not suffice. Google is about its search engine, done only with PageRank. There is no human indexing involved. Yahoo has been using a program called the “Idea factory” to promote inventive thinking in their company, staffers are supposed to improve everything from the company’s products to its campus. On the other hand, Google assumes inventive thinking. For example, the engineers of Google are required to spend a day a week on a personal project. This is how they come up with services such as Google News, which is now attracting quite a few number of people. “One company is building tools that reflect how people are expressing themselves. The other is building tools that will help find needles in haystacks. One is facilitating community development. The other is facilitating data retrieval,” said Matt McAlister. Yahoo owns the world’s most popular website and believes in a multidimensional approach as it tries its best to be all things for all people. First it will identify what the people want and from there figure out which products to build or buy in order to have the visitors stay on their site as long as possible. Google on the other hand owns the world’s leading online search engine, its mission is to transform the way today’s world is storing and finding information. They are taking a laissez faire approach toward innovation; before they start trying to figure out how everything will fit into a business plan they work on their new products and ideas first.
While Yahoo’s sales team is now focusing on traditional partnerships, handholding with ad agencies, and has an internal telemarketing group whose responsibility is to call small agencies and companies to work with Yahoo. Google believes in classifying advertising that is based on technology rather than relationships. Both companies are currently prospering but Yahoo’s market capitalization is $51 billion while Google’s is $76 billion. Financial analysts and industry watchers believe both companies can be part of the Internet economy however they worry that Google, just like Yahoo, will someday go through awkward years.

Microsoft Vs. Google
Microsoft is also competing with Google because Google is now a major threat to their dominance. While Google was launching all of its products for free, Microsoft was trying to catch up in search doing a project which they spent $150 million on but Google and Yahoo keep on getting ahead with new innovations such as complete maps and satellite photos. Bill Gates is worried about how much Google will hurt Microsoft’s core of franchise, control of what users will do when they first turn on their computers. Microsoft was always very powerful because it had control of the Windows operating system, they would decide which products and services consumers saw first. And so Microsoft did not have to make better products than its competitors, just about equal. It won because it went after competitors’ business models, not their technology. Now Microsoft’s strong points seem useless against Google. The people at Microsoft are worried that a “Google Office” will come out. And now that Google has come up with a desktop search there is no need for the start button in Windows. "Google is interesting not just because of web search, but because they're going to try to take that and use it to get into other parts of software," says Gates. You no longer need a PC to be on Google, you can use a cellphone, television, etc… Microsoft cannot cost less than Google because Google is free. There is no easy way to make Google’s online advertisers use another service. "Microsoft can play its old game to compete with Linux and Apple. It has to play Google's game to compete with Google,” says a former Microsoft executive. So Microsoft is thinking of now offering online services on top of their existing software lineup to compete with Google but some analysts are worried that this will cause Microsoft’s business model to go down the drain.

2. How have they used information technology to their advantage?

Google believes in classifying advertising that is based on technology rather than relationships. How does Google use information technology to their advantage? Google is a business. Besides trying its best to satisfy its users, it has to find ways of generating services that is highly technology-based thus utilizing the use of technology.


Googles’ technologies have been able to sort through a large amount of growing information on the web and deliver it to its users for free, a service which returns accurate information in a very short amount of time.

3. How competitive are they in the market?

Google is only becoming more powerful. It has a high competency in the market. It has a desktop search utility on the way, a shopping engine, news aggregator, and webmail services. Google is also hoping to offer a new browser (GBrowser). It would include all the Google properties such as Gmail, Froogle, Google News, Picasa, and Blogger. This means that the user could get all of his or her business done without ever having to leave the Google environment. This new browser would be another way to destination Google, meaning more revenue because more ads would be looked at by more users. It would also help Google control both data and applications, surpassing Microsoft. Google might also launch its own PC which would not need any Microsoft software.

Of course to make this all happen Google needs more talented employees. They have created a hiring machine which hires about ten employees a day. There are three hundred recruiters, and to find new talent Google has organized software-code writing contests and has many billboards with math problems. Google has paid to have “aptitute tests” included in tech magazines so that engineers will submit their answers to the questions and send their resumes. They have been offering free food to the engineering students so that they will pay attention to them and not their competition. Google will have to keep on prospering with the help of its talented engineers and its great ideas for future products. It will be able to beat competition by using its technologies and everyone around the world will be glad to use what it has to offer.

4. What new services do they offer?

Google is a business. Besides trying its best to satisfy its users it has to find ways of generating the most revenue. Google does this in a few different ways. The first one is the advertising which happens on the right side of the page when you search on Google, a program called AdWords. The second is offering its search technology to others, they do this with a program called AdSense which anybody on the web can start using. The third way in which they make money is through its Google Search Appliance which they sell to their customers. This appliance delivers accurate search results throughout a number of documents. Meaning your company would have its own search engine and it would work just as well as google.com.

However Google isn’t just a popular search engine it also does many other things that come in hand to many people around the world. Some of Googles’ services include Alerts where you receive news and search results by e mail, Blog Search which finds blogs on people’s favorite topics, Book Search to find text of any books, Images where you can find images on the web, Maps where you find maps and directions, and News where you can find many news stories. Some of Google’s tools include Blogger where you can express yourself online, Earth where you can explore the world from your PC, Translate where you can view web pages in other languages, and Talk where you can IM and call friends from your PC. Google is global, besides its main Google.com it includes one hundred and two other international domains such as Google.de, Googdle.fr, and Google.co.uk. One hundred different languages are available.

5. What makes them so unique?

There are many other search engines that we may use. What makes Google unique is on how they utilize technology and never stops in finding ways to make searching reliable, efficient and enjoyable.

A good way to get many users interested in the search engine is making it really easy to use. Google believes they should hide the complexity of their powerful search engine from their users so that they will be left with a simple, understandable way to get the information they need. So not only is the interface clear and simple, but the pages load instantly, the way the search results are placed is not sold to anybody, and the advertising it relevant content which does not get in the user’s way. Google really does provide the best user experience possible, it refuses to make any changes that would not benefit the users that go to their site. "The perfect search engine," says Google co-founder Larry Page, "would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want." Google likes to be fair meaning they refuse to make money through search result ranking or inclusion. All of the advertising has to be on the right of the page, none in the actual search results. Also Google only lets ads be displayed if they have something to do with the results page. Meaning certain searches might not include ads on the right. Google believes that these sponsored ads can help the user find what they want, which is why they have to be relevant to the search results. They want neutrality; there is no reason for one link to be before another one just because its owners paid more money. Unlike some of its competitors, Google provides inclusion and frequent updating in their sites for free. Meaning anybody’s website could be in the search results if their website is related to what the user typed in the search box. And this is great because it makes the search results completely accurate.

6. How competitive are they in the international market?

Google is really a giant in its field. I have read an article that states that Bill Gates wishes he could have combined software innovation with a brand new Internet business model like Google did. Just imagine that even one of the greatest company- Microsoft that was always very powerful because it had control of the Windows operating system, they would decide which products and services consumers saw first- was considering Google as its great competitor.

Google is global; besides its main Google.com it includes one hundred and two other international domains such as Google.de, Googdle.fr, and Google.co.uk. One hundred different languages are available. With this statistics, it is to be conclude that Google is really competitive in the international market.

Business models are perhaps the most discussed and least understood aspect of the web. There is so much talk about how the web changes traditional business models. But there is little clear-cut evidence of exactly what this means.
In the most basic sense, a business model is the method of doing business by which a company can sustain itself -- that is, generate revenue. The business model spells-out how a company makes money by specifying where it is positioned in the value chain.
Some models are quite simple. A company produces a good or service and sells it to customers. If all goes well, the revenues from sales exceed the cost of operation and the company realizes a profit. Other models can be more intricately woven. Broadcasting is a good example. Radio and later television programming has been broadcasted over the airwaves free to anyone with a receiver for much of the past century. The broadcaster is part of a complex network of distributors, content creators, advertisers (and their agencies), and listeners or viewers. Who makes money and how much is not always clear at the outset. The bottom line depends on many competing factors.
Internet commerce will give rise to new kinds of business models. That much is certain. But the web is also likely to reinvent tried-and-true models. Auctions are a perfect example. One of the oldest forms of brokering, auctions have been widely used throughout the world to set prices for such items as agricultural commodities, financial instruments, and unique items like fine art and antiquities. The Web has popularized the auction model and broadened its applicability to a wide array of goods and services.
Business models have been defined and categorized in many different ways. This is one attempt to present a comprehensive and cogent taxonomy of business models observable on the web. The proposed taxonomy is not meant to be exhaustive or definitive. Internet business models continue to evolve. New and interesting variations can be expected in the future.
The business model is simply a working description that includes the general details about the operations of a business. The components that are contained within a business model will address all functions of abusiness, including such factors as the expenses, revenues, operating strategies, corporate structure, and sales and marketing procedures. Generally speaking, anything that has to do with the day to day functionality of the corporation can be said to be part of the business model.
External factors also are part of a comprehensive business model. Chief among these elements is defining the target consumer audience for the goods and services produced by the corporation. This one single element of identifying the target audience will influence the form and function of both the marketing and sales efforts of the company, which in turn will impact the overall cost to produce each unit of a product. Thebusiness model will take this information into consideration and set retail pricing that will allow the company to operate at a profit, assuming a certain level of sales is realized consistently.

Before we know what Google Business Model is, let us know what Google is first. Google is the dominant search company on the Internet founded by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin on 1998. The company's primary revenue source comes from advertising related to Internet searches. But it is not the only revenue source.
AdWords and AdSense
Google is where it is today thanks largely to the revenue produced by its AdWords and AdSense programs. When a user performs a search on Google, the results are shown in two columns. The main column contains search results based on algorithms designed to provide the most relevant search results based on the keywords typed into the search box. To the right of this column are a list of paid text advertisements that are limited to four lines of text.
How it Works
When a user clicks on an AdWords text ad, the company or individual who composed the ad is charged a fee every time someone clicks on the ad. This type of advertising is known as pay per click (PPC) advertising. Additionally, Google pays a commission to websites, blogs, and other online destinations to display the Google ads on their sites. This is the AdSense program.
Advantages
The Adwords and Adsense programs work well because the ads are targeted to what the user is looking for.
YouTube and Facebook
Google owns both YouTube and Facebook. Both of these social media sites are free to users. Google has yet to figure out a way to monetise these two sites. As a result, both sites continue to spend more money than they take in through advertising.
Other Google Interests
Google is also investing heavily in the following areas: cloud computing, Internet browsers, Google maps, Google earth, online software applications, Android operating system for mobile devices, mobile phones, and a number of other media-related initiatives.
Google is a corporation that is becoming more profitable by the day. This massive internet giant has a continuous growth that has made it one of the richest technology based companies in the world. It currently employs thousands of people has has stretched itself across the four corners of the cyber world.

Google’s Competitors are:
• Yahoo
• MSN
• AOL, Inc.
To better understand Google and its business model, one needs to break it down into three data inputs.
• Relevancy of results.
• Speed of search.
• Cost of executing a search query.
While their results aren’t optimal, they are good enough. Just like Microsoft Windows was good enough to dominate the market. Google, according to Hitwise, now has 64 percent of the total search market. And although a typical Google query can often be an act of futility, we put up with it because the results are fast. If they’re wrong, we can just start all over again.
The faster the results show up on our browsers, the less inclined we’ll be to switch to a rival search engine, no matter how great the rival’s search methodology may be. The faster (and more efficient) its infrastructure, the more easily Google can keep serving the ad-based money machine.
In other words, 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. Now that is really, really fast. Google does this by indexing the Internet quite well. The magic is in delivering the search results from this index at lightening speed, and that requires an infrastructure — oodles of bandwidth and specialized hardware — that is finely tuned, much like a Formula One Car.
Against this backdrop, it 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 me rephrase that: 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 number of racks, fiber, routers and everything in between is mind-boggling. If this system were built using gear from established hardware makers, it would take a superhuman effort to make it all work together. In other words, the sheer cost to keep such a beast going would suck up a major component of the infrastructure.
why the Google Business Model is a winning Business Model?

The answer is a complex one, and involves more factors. It's a mix of smart decisions, excellent marketing strategy, great advisors, highly innovative and risky business model, and great products.

These are the key resons why the Google Business Model won:

1.- Google had - and still has - a simple, clean, clear, minimalistic user interface. no frills, just the logo and the search box - easy and fast to load. And this was a key feature with the slow internet connections of the early years 1999 -2001 - while Yahoo and most of the other search engines were more like generalistic portals, full of confusion, full of useless features and useless links, full of annoying banner ads, heavy and slow to load.

Google had a clear understanding on psychology of perception, and how the interaction eye/brain works, while the bigger competitors didn't.

Bottom line is: If the user visits a search engine, what he wants to get is simply that: just a search engine.

A search engine which is fast and reliable. If the user wants a generalistic portal, he goes to a portal, not to a search engine.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google Executives, understood this, and this was what they delivered. And made their users happy.

2.- Google had - and has - reliable search results (not always, but most of the time). Page and Brin's PageRank algorithm worked well.

3.- Google got good advice from VC's and from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been advised and assisted from the beginning by John Doerr, VC Partner of Kleiner Perkins and by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the leading law firm of Silicon Valley


Insight on Google Business Model

4.- Google introduced a smart, innovative and quite risky business model - Adwords - and the pay per click concept. The risk proved winning, and the innovative business model worked. Still today Adwords is the main source of revenues of Google Inc.

5.- In the following years, Google became a powerhouse with an impressive pipeline of new great products - Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Video, Gmail. And slim revenues.

6.- Google worked very hard on Brand Building. It seems that brand building was much more important to them than just revenues and profits. The strategy worked. And it was a key asset in the subsequent IPO at the Nasdaq.

7 - Google was an innovator of the Business Model. Google delivered all these great new products basically for free, enticing and luring million of users worldwide, with the result of building the Brand in an outstanding, quite unbelievable way - and did it so fast.


Eric Schmidt was made CEO of the company, David Drummond, an attorney of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati who had advised Google founders since the early days, joined Google as Chief Legal Officer, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati took care of the IPO at Nasdaq.

At the IPO in August 2004 Google share price was set at $85, which to many financial analysts seemed eccessive and unreasonable. In nov. 2007 Google shares had topped $700.
And in nov. 2007 Google stock market capitalization reached $230 billion, while annual revenues reached $16 billion and profits $4 billion.

An excellent return for Google shareholders.

Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have said themselves that the current pre-dominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. Google Ads went from a means to generate the necessary revenue to keep the budding search engine on its feet to a profit machine that became a key focus in Google's business plans. This form of advertising is cheap for businesses to buy, easy for Google to distribute and highly profitable. On top of all this, the ingenuity of it is that it allows other individuals to generate their own money by getting other web users to click on the advertisements when they visit their web site. Within no time businesses and indivduals alike wanted a piece of the Google Ads action. This sudden popularity was used as part of the model and therefore allowed Google to get its own name around the cyber world, quickly gaining the title of biggest search giant. It has been growing ever since.

The other side of Google's hugely successful business plan is innovation. The Google brand became one of the internets most well known names within just years of it being in operation. The advertisement system and the quality of Google's search algorithms set the search engine at the top of its game. Realising that their success couldn't just stop there, Google turned to innovation. The company quickly expanded, providing endless services to the individual; Google News, Google Maps, Google Earth, Froogle, Google Scholar, Google Products the list goes on an on. Innovation became a key part of Google's business plan as it allowed them to expand at the rate they do.

http://www.ehow.com/facts_5863540_google-business-model_.html
http://gigaom.com/2007/12/04/google-infrastructure/
http://digitalenterprise.org/models/models.htm
http://www.helium.com/items/710040-a-look-at-googles-business-model

Google is a highly successful Internet business. Recently they have broadened their scope with a multitude of new tools.

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
2. Google Nexus One
3. Google Click-to-Call (Billing) in Ads on Mobile Devices
4. Google Goggles

What makes them so unique?

1. GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Search Positions in Google:
Gaining search positions in Google (or Google SEO as the industry now calls it) is quite straightforward, it's all about using an ethical approach and providing unique information that is high quality but from a website that is compliant to Google’s guidelines.

2. Google SEO:
The preoccupation with manipulation of Google’s algorithm (Google SEO) has led most webmasters to overlook what is really needed by the search engine to rank your website highly. In order to gain a full grasp of this you need to understand what Google’s ultimate goal is. Now that Google’s IPO has been completed the spotlight has turned back onto what gave it the success in the first place – relevant search results.

How competitive are they in the international market?

Even with the economic crisis, Google has a solid financial position. The assertion that Google has a lot to learn in its international efforts couldn't be more over-stated. Google has had success in the international environment, including greater market share than in the domestic market, that every Internet company would covet.

Google has had success with other products abroad, most notably its Orkut social network which has bombed domestically to its MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn brethren, yet has taken off in huge countries such as India and Brazil. So, sure, Google should be sensitive to cultural sensitivities and will face different regulatory environments abroad, but the truth is that Google has been remarkably successful internationally in large part due to the international word-of-mouth generated by their product and feature set.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html
http://articles.seoperfectcart.com/understand-and-make-money-with-google-adwords/google-advantages
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_fabulous_new_features_google_unveiled_today.php
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=172444
http://www.glgroup.com/News/Google-International--Greater-Market-Share-Now-Distancing-from-the-Pack-to-Come-18168.html