Strategic Management for Professional Practice - Essay Example

We will determine whether what Google is doing is a winning strategy by using the Goodness of Fit Test and the Competitive Advantage Test. Google started as a smaller company called BackRub in which they discovered and set out to use the new internet and its growth creating a new advertising medium for companies of all kinds. Search based adds became very popular and were proving to be financially exciting with an expected growth to $5.8 billion in market funds by 2013. Then BackRub knew that they had a way to search the web faster than anyone else and get highly relevant results quickly.

The then strategic thinking of Larry Page and Sergey Brin collaborated and Google was born from a mathematical term called googol (Gamble, J, 2008). The use of the name Google was meant to be an indication of the random numbers used to create their search method. Manipulating the external environment has been a major strength of Googles from the beginning. Their strategies here have seemed to be crafted and did not just emerge as part of their strategic thinking process (Mintzberg, H., 1987).

Understanding the external environment is often not easy but Google seems to understand it well. It is even more complicated in Googles case because their business is the internet and they became a global entity very quickly. They remained, however, consistently aware of the changing of the external environment and responded quickly. In the beginning it was the building of a faster search engine, it has later been the addition of business to expand their influence. Google rose to the top rapidly and had to respond just as rapidly to change.

Their search engine became extremely popular in a short time and Google was attracting millions in venture capital. They responded with new technology, search capabilities in several languages, and a Google tool bar browser. They followed these with Google News, Product Search, Scholar, and Local to name a few.