Google's 10th Birthday - Article Example

Introduction Google is an organization that offers a myriad of web based services and has been in this kind of business for 10 years now. When Microsoft started out it was never conceived that the monopoly that the company held will ever be competed for until Google showed up. Now Google wants to compete with Microsoft as far as the web browsing machines are concerned. As Google celebrates its 10th birthday it continues to go strong in its service delivery. This paper seeks to highlight the rise, present state and future of Google as a company. Google was born in January 1996 by a then Ph.D. student at Stanford University, Larry Page (Google, 2007). Page initially set out to explore two main things from his choice of projects. These two things were: exploration of the mathematical property of the worldwide web and an understanding of the worldwide web as an enormous graph. Terry Winograd, Page’s supervisor on the project encouraged him to press on with the project and since then Page has viewed this encouragement from his supervisor as the best advice ever received. At inception of Google, page’s main concern was to find out which page linked to what page besides the numbers and natures of such linkages called back links. Hew therefore his project as “BackRub” and was soon joined by his friend and Stanford PhD colleague Sergey Brin. Setting out from the Stanford homer page that Page had created, the ‘web crawler’ which was later to be called Google began to explore the worldwide web in 1996 and it aimed at gathering the back link data as a measure of the importance of a given page. They than went on to develop a page Rank algorithm which was meant to rank back links ranked by importance for any one given URL. This was a hit during this time because according to the two, listing back links in terms of importance would be more effective and efficient as opposed to the existing search engines that ranked the search results in terms of the number of times a search term appeared on a page. In conclusion of their project and in test of their thesis, they realized that the pages that bore most back links to them from a number of associated relevant searches must be the pages which are most relevant for any one given search. Googol to Google Just how did the company get to be named as Google? The search engine used the Stanford website bore a domain called google.stanford.edu and they registered google.com domain in September1997 only to incorporate the company, Google, in September 1998. “Google” was derives from a misspelt “googol” (1 followed by one-hundred zeros) (Hanley, 2003). This was the beginning of an entrepreneurial epic that no one would have ever conceived at that time. The progress of Google was a little bit fast and by 1998, it had hit an index of 60 million pages. Many people had already started to show their preference of the Google search machine to the other search machines such as Yahoo!, Lycos, MSN.com, AOL.com, Netscapes Netcenter, Go.com and Excite.com which were still in existence and had already been seen as the future of the worldwide web more especially during the 1998 dot com craze. Google was identified to be fast and technologically innovative and this fact was attested to by an article appearing in Salon.com which credited Google’s search results as the best as compared to those of the competitors named earlier (Rosenberg, 1998). Indeed as Rosenberg Scott’s 1998 article titled “Yes, There Is a Better Search Engine: While the Portal Sites Fiddle, Google Catches Fire,” which appeared on Salon.com, 21 December 1998 implied, Google was already catching fire whereby it would burn in the full glare of popularity and preference especially from the stock market investors. By March of 1999, Google was already moving into its offices as a formidable web based service providing company on the verge of becoming the brand of choice among the web users. It bought a number of silicon technology ventures and continued to outgrow a number of other sites as time progressed. Actually, in 1999, the company having surpassed two competing sites, it set out to lease a complex to house its offices which were to demonstrate the kind of success that the company had become. The complex of buildings situated at Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway belonged to Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Google managed to by the buildings from this company in 2006 at a cost of more than $300 million thereby housing its headquarters in this complex of buildings (Staff Writer, 2006). Google began in its upward growth trend and the Google search engine has established loyalty among its users. The loyal users liked the engine because of its design which excluded a lot of data thereby enhancing speed (Thompson, 2003). Just around this time of loyalty, in 2000, Google had already begun selling keyword advertisements for searches. These were sold depending on both the price bids and the click through when used. This helped the company generate considerable revenue as it continued to rock the internet market (Kopytoff & Fost, 2004). "Dont be evil" was later taken up by the Google Company in its bid to remain at the top amid tough competition without unnecessarily taking part in unethical business practices such as discrediting its competitors through advertisements or hacking the competitors’ sites. They included this phrase in their prospectus for their Initial Public Offer (IPO) in 2004. The initial funding for the company came from a contribution of $100,000 from Sun Microsystems co-founder, Andy Bechtolsheim in 1998 (Kopytoff & Fost, 2004). In 1999, a $25 million equity offer was registered and the main investors were drawn from rival capital firms. The Company continued to raise revenues and in 2004 it managed to raise more than $2.5 billion from an IPO which had initially projected to raise about $4 billion. It should be understood at this point in time that the rival company Microsoft also benefited from the 2004 IPO having managed to own 2.7 million shares of the total 22,351,900 shares traded during the IPO (Kuchinskas, 2004). One very important aspect of Google is its culture in which all of its more than 3,021 employees (excluding temporary employees) happen to be equity holders as well. This culture has seen the company register ever growing profit margins as a result of this collective employee ownership. For instance, the company managed to register a massive profit of $105.6 million from its equally massive revenues of $961.8 million in 2003. Actually, since 2001 Google has continued to record progressively massive profit margins and it is evident that the aggressive upward trend is here to stay. Just to illustrate the milestones that have been made by Google to afford its yearly upward growth trend, here is a list of some of the milestones: Milestones 1 2004- Acquired Keyhole, Inc Company which was the developer of Earth Viewer which was later called Google Earth in 2005 2 2006- Acquired video site YouTube and JotSpot (developer of wiki collaborative websites (La Monica $ Paul, 2006). 3 2007- Acquired Double-Click and Grand Central at US$3.1 billion and US$50 million respectively (Stort, & Helft, 2007). The company also acquired a messaging security and compliance company Google (Press release), 2007). The above milestones were as far as acquisitions were concerned. One more acquisition that saw Google expand its advertisements to include Radio besides the usual internet medium was the acquisition of a radio advertising company called DMarc in 2006. Besides acquisitions, the company has since 2001 entered into a number of partnerships with a number of companies offering various services. For instance, in 2005 Google and NASA stroke a partnership to venture into projects in research e.g. nanotechnology, data management and distributed computing among other projects (Mills, 2005). Furthermore, Google entered into a partnership with Sun Microsystems and AOL of Time Warner. With the former, the partnership was aimed at distributing each other’s technologies whereas that with the latter was aimed at augmenting each others video search services. Recently, in 2009, Google partnered with GeoEye in launching a satellite which has since been used to enhance and power Google’s product called Google Earth. Just around the same time Google went ahead to form a partnership with Life magazine to archive the Magazine’s photographs some of which never got a chance to be published. Generally, the company has made a number of progresses through partnerships and acquisitions but still without these, the company was still a success. Most of these acquisitions have been ventures aimed at either enhancing the company’s services or improving other company’s services while gaining revenue at the same time. What are some of the products and services that Google offers to its customers? Generally, Google has created goods and services aimed at both the general public and business oriented environments. Some of these products and services include business solutions, web based applications and advertising networks. The success of Google has often been credited to its internet and radio advertisements. It offers websites that offer advertisement space. Actually, 99% of Googles revenue comes from its advertisement plans (Google, 2008). This is because of the Google’s cheap advertisements which are often charged in terms of per- click or per-view schemes. However, there has been criticism targeted at Google by the advertisers in which the advertisers have approximated 14-20% of the click or views on the advertisements they pay for are fraudulent in which people click on them without necessarily having interest on the product or service being advertised. Besides the advertisements services, Google sells software. The common software it sells is the Google web search engine. This engine is the most popularly used and claims more than 53% web advertising market share. The other search engines such as Yahoo! and Live Search Claiming 19.9% and 12.9% of the web advertising market share respectively (Nielsen, 2007). Just like the yahoo e-mail services, Google also introduced its web-based e-mail service known as G-mail which among other features has the spam-filtering technology, conversation view and has the capacity to utilize most of Google technology in applications such a searching an e-mail. The question that remains is how the free web based e-mail service benefits Google as a company? The service generates revenue by displaying advertisements and therefore in this way the company is able to benefit. Finally, the company offers the software called Google earth which is able to locate specific geographic regions with precision. However, this product has been criticized for its ability to undermine national security because most government agencies can be viewed with much precision thereby posing dangers of terrorist attacks. Despite this, the product has been helpful in helping researchers, geographers etc to assess information which would otherwise be hectic to get. So far the company has made a myriad of milestones towards commanding an almost leading stature in the market. The company continues with its innovative culture of bringing on new products and services to the market almost on annual basis. Presently, the company continues to offer more superior products such as Google Language Tools which is basically a server-side machine translation service with the ability of translating up to 35 languages to each other thereby making slightly more than 1100 language pairs. Furthermore, the search engine extension service such as the popular Firefox was able to reach a number of Google’s utilities such as the already mentioned Google Translate from the browser. So far, the company continues to offer superior services and top of the range innovations which leave its loyal customers and consumers fully satisfied. Conclusion In its continued culture of innovation, Google announced Google Chrome, an open-source web browser which it finally delivered to the market in September 2008. So whats next for Google? Well, a company like Google which believes in surprise it is hard to predict what lies ahead of the company ventures. Chrome has been introduced enabling users to run applications which have initially depended on local PCs and in this trend of innovation it is believed that in the next ten years, Chrome would have made the Microsoft’s operating systems redundant. In conclusion, Google is soon gripping the market share that will either see the competitors sell their shares to Google or move out of market. If the competitors won’t be more creative to live up to the pace of Google, it is probable that they will ultimately lose business. As Google celebrates its 10th Birthday, it also celebrates a myriad of milestones that have since seen it lead the market in its innovative and communal employee ownership culture which among other signature cultures such as that of Do no Evil has seen it continue to rock and lead the market. It is evident that the future is more than bright for the market leader and innovator Google. References Google, (2007): Corporate Information: Google Milestones, Retrieved on March 18th 2009 from Google Homepage Hanley R, (2003): From Googol to Google: Co-founder returns, The Stanford Daily, February 12, 2003 Rosenberg S, (1998): Yes, There Is a Better Search Engine: While the Portal Sites Fiddle, Google Catches Fire, Salon.com, 21 December 1998 Staff Writer, (2006): Google to Buy Headquarters Building from Silicon Graphics, Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal. June 16, 2006 Thompson B, (2003): Is Google good for you? BBC News, December 19, 2003 Kopytoff V & Fost D, (2004): For Early Googlers, Key Word Is $$$", San Francisco Chronicle April 29, 2004 Kuchinskas S, (2004): Yahoo and Google Settle, internetnews.com. August 9, 2004 La Monica & Paul R, (2006): Google to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion, CNN 9 October 2006 Stort L, & Helft M, (2007): Google Buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion, The New York Times. 13 April 2007 Google (Press release), (2007): Google to acquire Postini, Retrieved on 18th March 2009 from http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/postini_20070709.html Mills E, (2005): Can Google Beat The New-Office Curse? CNET 28 September 2005 Google Annual Report, Feb. 15, 2008 Nielsen, (2007): Search Share for Top 10 Search Engines, Nielsen//NetRatings 26 October 2007 Read More