Strategic Business Analysis of Google

Image via WikipediaGoogle is an amazing company. They have become the no.1 most visited web site on the web beating Yahoo for the top spot with a web page that is mostly blank and showing a text area for search.

Their market share in search has reached close to 69 percent beating convincingly all other competitors.

Double click on the image of the table for a bigger table.

Recently, they have been firing on all the fronts. They are at the forefront of cloud computing. They have Google docs as a fastest growing application and they are very active in the area of social networking software with their work in the area of "Open Social".

They have been open and close in providing information about their operations. They have been very secretive or reluctant in providing information about the working of their giant data centers or the algorithm that ranks the web pages. Other then that they have been very open and have supported open source software development in a big way.


I guess having Hal Varian, author of "Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy" as economists has something to do with this. Their strategy of close/open is creating a positive feed back loop that makes them grow at a faster pace without spending significant efforts for marketing themselves. The viral marketing has worked for them very well even Seth Godin has acknowledged this viral nature of their growth.

Also, they strongly believe in "eating their own dog food". I mean most of the applications they are supporting are also internally used within the company. You will see a big presence of Google channel on Youtube to release the product information. You will see them using sites.google.com for promoting their initiatives. You will see them using Google docs for document creation and distribution.

All of this establishes a positive feed back loop that other competitors simply can not copy because they are still using the traditional approach of management from the old Industrial era or they have made some minor adjustments to accommodate the knowledge workers.

These slides provide a distinct view of Google winning strategy.

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