Google the entrepreneurial juggernaut final by Joseph Ricardo

Google the Entrepreneurial Juggernaut 1
Google the Entrepreneurial Juggernaut
Joe Ricardo
APUS
Business 621
November 30, 2014

Table of Contents
Abstract.……………………………………………………………………………….... 3
Introduction to Google ………………………………………………………………….. 4
Google’s Founding Fathers ……………………………………………………………… 4
Sergey Brin………………………………………………………………………….5
Lawrence Page……………………………………………………………………... 6
A Brief History of Google ………………………………………………………………… 7
1995-1999…………………………………………………………………………. 8
2000…….…………………………………………………………………………. 9
2001-2003…………………………………………………………………………. 10
2004-2006…………………………………………………………………………. 11
2007-2008…………………………………………………………………………. 12
2010-2011…………………………………………………………………………. 13
2012-2013 …….………..…………………………………………………………. 14
The Innovation of Google ………………………………………………………………… 14
Management Team ……………………………………………………………………….. 15
Other Key Players of Google …………………………………………………………….. 16
Google’s Corporate Culture ………………………………………………………………. 17
Problems.…………………………………………………………………………………... 19
Google’s Success ………………………………………………………………………….. 20
Expansion ………………………………………………………………………………….. 21
Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………… 23
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Abstract
Google began as an idea formulated by two Stanford graduate students who would eventually
drop out. Sergey Brin and Larry Page had similar interests in data mining and organizing the
information on the internet. Their success almost did not come as they attempted to sell their
company in its infancy to rival search engine companies such as Yahoo! and Excite, but both
companies would reject such offers. Google would go on to surpass both web search sites and
become one of the top companies in the entire world. These two men were able to succeed at
their dream to organize the entire internet onto one website. This is one of the greatest
entrepreneurial success stories in the history of the business world.
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Introduction to Google
Internet search engines have made it possible for people to access information on any
topic they want with the ease of the internet. Now a vast array of information is available to
anyone just at the tips of their fingers. Internet search engines have come a long way from Archie
in the 1990’s, to Yahoo in the late 90’s, but most like Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista and numerous
others have faded out and have become obsolete (Kim, L, 2014). The grand champion of the
search engine has become Google; with little competition still existing with sites likes
Microsoft’s Bing, and the old champion Yahoo!, which dominated the internet search engine
market throughout the early 2000’s. Yahoos in fact had an opportunity to purchase Google in
1998, but opted not too and are surely regretting that decision after being dethroned from the
crown of top internet search by Google today. People around the world are now conducting
40,000 Google searches every second, 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches each
year (Internet Live Stats, 2014). In fact Google searches account for two thirds of all internet
searches that are done worldwide. Google’s services are available worldwide in most major
languages around the globe.
Google’s Founding Fathers
The company that would become Google began with the meeting of two Stanford
Graduate students who would eventually drop out before gaining their PhD. Sergey Brin and
Larry Page were two Computer Science majors with similar interests. Brin’s interest was in data
mining and patterns on the internet, linking links from other links. Page was interested in the
organization of all the information on the internet, sort of a reference page for every website on
the internet. The culmination of these two geniuses would lead to one of the largest companies in
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the history of the world and an organization of all the information on the internet onto one main
page.
Sergey Brin was born in the Soviet Union on August 21 in 1973 (Bloomberg, 2010). His
parents were both mathematicians but because they were Jewish in Soviet Russia their career
opportunities were very limited (Vise, 2006). Because Michael Brin was Jewish he had to change
his major from Astronomy to Mathematics because Jewish people were not allowed to hold
upper professional ranks. Even after receiving straight A’s in Mathematics he was unable to be
accepted into a graduate school because of his religion (Malseed, 2007). Sergey’s father had
attended a conference in Warsaw, Poland in 1977, where he met a bunch of colleagues from the
west and saw there was a better life in the west for his family. The family applied for their exit
Visa in 1978, and Michael was fired from his job because of it. Sergey’s mother Genia was also
fired for the same reason and the family struggled for many months hoping and waiting for their
exit Visa to be approved which was not a guarantee. Sergey and his family’s exit visas were
finally approved and they immigrated to the United States from Russia when he was six.
Sergey’s father always encouraged him to get A’s in school and to always be in first place at
everything he did. His father found a job at the University of Maryland in the Mathematics
department and even though Sergey attended public school his father still educated him at home.
When Brin was 16 his father led a group of high school students on a two week exchange
program to Russia, during that trip Sergey to his father aside and said to him “Thank you for
taking us all out of Russia”. Sergey enrolled in 1990 at the University of Maryland and received
his Bachelors in Commuter Science and Mathematics in 1993 with honors.
Lawrence “Larry” Page was born on March 26, 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan. His
father was the first in his family to ever receive a college education and degree. His father Carl
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Page majored in Computer Science which in the 1960’s was just developing as a field. Carl
would earn his PhD in Computer Science in 1965. Larry would become a second generation
Computer Science major, a very rare occurrence in the 1990’s. In an interview Page recalled how
his house was always messy with Popular Science magazines and computer hardware all over the
place (Scott, 2008). He first got into computers by playing with some of the computers around
the house. He also recalled being the first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment
on a word processor. Along with his brother he learned how to dismantle computers and realized
at the age of 12 he wanted to become an inventor. In 2009 at his graduation from the University
of Michigan, he shared how he one day recorded a dream about what if the whole web could be
downloaded with just the links to every website. Page has since received several patents on ideas
and methods for improving internet search including one for a “method for node ranking in
linked database” granted in 2001 as well as for a “method for scoring documents in a linked
database” granted in 2004 (Page, 2001 and 2004).
These two future technology entrepreneurs had similar interests. Brin wanted to take all
the pages on the worldwide web and make sense of all the information, find patterns on the
internet in other words data mining. Page on the other hand had the concept of organizing all of
the content of the internet into one main page. He considered each link a sort of citation that
should be all linked together on one main page that users could search for information. Together
they wrote a graduate paper entitled: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hyper textual Web Search
Engine” (Brin & Page, 1998). Brin had been writing papers for years related to search engine
technology at Stanford with papers entitled “Copy Detection Mechanisms for Digital
Documents”, “Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces” and “Query Free News Search” all
in 1995. He also authored a paper entitled “Extracting Patterns and Relations on the World Wide
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Web” in 1999. Brin and Page actually co-wrote a paper for Stanford in 1998 entitled “The
PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web”. In this paper they write about the
importance of organizing the information on the web by searchers interests, attitudes and
knowledge. Page also wrote “Efficient crawling through URL ordering”. The culmination of
these research papers by Brin and Page show that their minds were dead set on organizing the
internet through their educations in computer sciences.
A Brief History of Google
Google’s predecessor Yahoo! was in fact also founded by two electrical engineering
students at Stanford, Jerry Yang and David Filo back in 1994 several years before Google began.
The idea began when the two formulated a computer program that would collect sports data and
analyze it to create algorithms that would help determine winners of future games. While the
program was not successful it had laid down the foundation for their search engine. Yahoo’s
success would become short lived as their fellow Stanford alumni’s from Google would
eventually dominate the internet search market. Yahoo! and competition Excite had the
opportunity to purchase Google for $ 1 million in 1997 but both companies refused. By the year
2000 Yahoo! began using Google’s search engine on the Yahoo! website. By 2002 Yahoo!
attempted to buy the company for $ 3 billion but at that time Google refused (Altucher, 2012).
Yahoo’s failures continued as Microsoft attempted to purchase the company in 2007 for $ 44.6
billion dollars Jerry Yang refused and was eventually forced to step down by investors as the
companies value sank far below Microsoft’s initial offer, in fact Yahoo’s value sank to $ 20
billion by 2011, less than half the value of Microsoft’s offer (Damouni, 2011). Yahoo’s failures
helped pave the way for Google to take over the top spot for internet search engines.
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It was in 1995 when co-founders of Google met at Stanford when Sergey Brin and Larry
Page were introduced. Brin who had already been attending Stanford for two years was assigned
to show students around campus including Page. It was in 1996 when these two created Backrub
which operated on Stanford servers but ended up overloading their bandwidth and were forced to
stop using Stanford’s servers.
It was September 15 of 1997 when Page and Brin registered Google.com; their mission
was to organize an insurmountable and infinite amount of information on the internet. The word
Google was actually a word play on the word googol which is a mathematical term for a number
with a one followed by one hundred zero’s, representative of the overwhelming amount of
information they planned to organize on their website
The year 1998 was when the company began to expand, and gain support and funding.
Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim becomes their first financial investor donating $100,000 to
Google Inc in August, he is even quoted as saying this was the first and only time he wrote a
check to a company right on the spot. September of 1998 was a busy month for the Google
founders; they incorporated, opened up shop in a garage and hired their first employee. On
September 4th
Brin and Page open a business account and incorporate their company. The
company begins their first shop in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, for $ 1,700 a month. Susan was
pregnant and looking for some extra cash to pay her mortgage (LaPorte, 2014). Craig Silverstein
become the companies first employee, he was also a computer science major at Stanford. He was
instrumental in the startup forming their search engine. By December of 1998, Google was
named the number one search engine by PC Magazine for what they quoted was their “uncanny
knack for returning extremely relevant results”.
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By February of 1999 the company had outgrown the garage and established an office on
University Ave. in Palo Alto, now with eight employees. In early 1999 Brin and Page decided to
try and sell the company as they felt it was distracting them from their academic studies. They
offered the company to Excite CEO George Bell for $ 1 million, but he rejected the offer. In June
of 1999 they were able to raise $ 25 million in equity funding from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner,
Perkins, Caufield & Byers (Google Press, 1999).
In May of 2000 Google releases its first ten foreign language versions of their search
website for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and several other European languages. By
September they expand to offer Google in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. October they launch
their AdWords with only 350 customers, but will end up becoming one of their main sources of
revenue. Brin and Page had been sort of against the idea of advertising as they felt that was what
was watering down the user experience on sites like Yahoo! but under pressure from their
investors they decided to take the leap into the advertising arena. They found the solution by
providing a more internet user friendly advertising experience by copying the method used by
Bill Gross from Idealab. Gross method was to use the search queries to find out not only what
individuals were interested in but what they may also be interested in buying (Heilemann, 2008).
Google and Bill Gross had met and talked about merging his technology with their search
engine, the merger never happened. Soon after Google had implemented their AdWords
advertising program which was strikingly similar to Bill Gross technology. A lawsuit followed
and the two parties ended up settling their differences out of court. In December they release the
Google toolbar which allows users to conduct internet searches without actually visiting the site
through popular browsers such as Internet Explorer. What integrating advertising did for Google
was begin to bring in revenue and profits to a company that would one day become one of the
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largest companies on earth. Less than two years after they had launched the company they had
indexed over a billion websites and had become the most popular search engine on the web.
In 2001 Google made their first acquisition purchasing Deja.com a discussion group that
would eventually become Google Groups. In July they launch their Google Images which
initially allows access to over 250 million images on the internet. The expansion of Google
continues as they open their first international office in Tokyo, Japan in August. With the
expansion of the company venture capitalist John Doerr and Michael Moritz began pressuring
Brin and Page to hire a CEO with more business experience then themselves. The company in
turn hired Eric Schmidt as the CEO of the company who was not only a business man but had an
educational background in engineering. Page becomes President of Products and Brin becomes
President of Technology. The two founders had decided to step back and share responsibility of
running the company for the greater good of Google.
In 2002 they improve upon their AdWords advertising by introducing a pay per click
feature that allows advertisers to only pay for advertising when a users actually clicks and links
to their page. AdWords provides business and consumers with a better advertising experience
compared to the older banner ads and pop up advertising. In September they launched their
Google News from 4,000 news sources, today Google News links to over 50,000 news sources in
70 languages and as of 2012 receive over 6 billion clicks per month, this idea came about due to
the companies 20% policy which allowed employees to use that time to pursue self interested
projects.
In February 2003 Google acquired Pyra Labs the creators of Blogger which today
receives more than 300 million visitors each month. Then in March they launch their AdSense
which allowed websites to earn money by allowing targeted advertising on their page, this
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program allowed for one website to offer targeted ads to each visitor based on the history of their
searches. This was a completely different advertising experience than the old popup windows
and banner advertisements which were generic advertisements that were not directly related to
every person viewing it. In December they launched Google Print (eventually renamed Google
Books) which began digitally scanning books onto the internet, they have currently have scanned
over 20 million books.
In March of 2004 Google opens their Googleplex in Mountain View with over 800
employees, still their main office today. In this same month they also launch Google Local
(which would eventually become Google Maps) this service offers maps, business listings as
well as directions. In April they launched their email service Gmail, starting as an invite only
service but now serves over 425 million users worldwide. August was one of if not the biggest
moment in their company’s history when they began their Initial Public Offering of over 19
million shares which opened at $ 85 per share. In October they acquired Keyhole a digital
mapping company that will eventually help with the creation of Google Earth. November the
company begins a beta version of Google Scholar which allows researchers to view peer
reviewed books, papers, theses, research, and other scholarly material.
In 2005 Google launches their Google Maps within two months the program adds
directions and satellite views as well as expands to a mobile phone application. In June they
launched Google search for mobile devices, today mobile internet use has outpaced that of home
based computing. In November they released Google Analytics which allowed for websites and
marketers to measure the results of their advertising campaigns, the program was based on
Urchin a company they had acquired in 2005. In December Gmail launches for mobile devices in
the United States.
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The year 2006 saw numerous new programs launched by Google. Google Finance
allowed users to access financial information more easily through their numerous Google News
outlets. They launched Google Calendar which allowed people to better organize their lives as
well as share information with other users. One of their greatest innovations came with their
Google Translate application, which currently allows for translation between 70 plus languages.
They also launched Google Wallet, similar to PayPal it allows for users to store their credit card
and bank information to more easily make payments. At the end of the year they acquired
YouTube a year old video sharing startup, which users currently view over six billion hours of
videos per month.
In January of 2007 Fortune Magazine announces Google as number one on their “best
companies to work for” list; they have since topped the list four other times. They expand
Google Maps expands to add traffic information for over 30 cities around the U.S. Google Maps
today provides traffic information in over 50 countries and more than 600 cities. They also
released Street View for Google Maps in five major cities which is now available in over 50
cities. They launched Google Safe Browsing in May which helped protect users from malicious
content on the internet which can slow down or damage their computers. They also launch
Android their mobile software application which will eventually dominate the mobile phone
market. Android was purchased in 2005 with the intentions that years down the road online
mobile device use would outpace that of PC’s. With the success of Apples iPhones in 2007,
Google with their Android technology was ready to enter the mobile phone software market to
compete with Steve Jobs Apple phones.
The year 2008 saw the integration of Doubleclick to their AdWords program. They also
launch their own web browser Google Chrome which today is used by 750 million users and is
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the second most used web browser behind Internet Explorer (but according to some estimates has
surpassed that of Internet Explorer). T-Mobile launches the G1 the first mobile phone to use the
Android software.
In 2009 Google launches Voice Search for Android devices which allows users to do
internet searches by speaking into the device, making search an easier experience for users. They
also begin development of the Google Chrome Operating System. Google Maps integrates GPS
navigation which offers voice guidance, 3-D views and live data on traffic. In December they
launch Google Chrome versions for Mac and Linux computers. This is also the year that
Microsoft launches Bing; Microsoft’s version of a search engine designed to compete head to
head with Google.
In 2010 Google’s Android based phones outsell Apples iPhone’s, putting them at the top
of the mobile phone software market. Google also releases their Nexus line of products using
Android software. In February Google releases its first ever Super Bowl advertisement which
tells a love story through search terms. In May Google releases their Google TV which allows
users to stream internet television from through Android and Chrome. In October they announce
plans to build and test automobiles that can drive themselves, to date those cars have logged over
500,000 miles.
In April of 2011 Larry Page takes over as CEO of the company 10 years after stepping
down from the position. Eric Schmidt becomes chairman of the board. In May the company
launches the first Chromebooks with partners Acer and Samsung which operate on Google
Chrome Operating Systems. In the summer they install electric vehicle charging stations, which
today is the largest of its kind in the country with over 750 charging stations. In December the
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Android market surpasses 10 billion downloaded applications. They also launched Google Plus
their answer to the social media juggernaut Facebook.
In February of 2012 Google launches Chrome for Android and soon after launch the web
browser for iOS the Apple operating system .In March the Android market becomes Google Play
which offers downloadable apps, movies, books, games and other downloads. In May Google
acquired Motorola Mobility which of course will now integrate Android software into all of their
phones.
In 2013 the company acquired Waze an Israel company that had designed a program to
help drivers outsmart traffic. The company forms their Calico branch which focuses on health
and well being with a focus on increasing longevity of life.
This brief history only touches on some of the major milestones in the company’s years
their achievements are so numerous they cannot all be described in a 20 page report. The Google
Company has year after year continued to not only improve upon their search engine and
advertising, but to also improve on all of their products and services as well as expand into new
arenas and innovative ventures. Just becoming the number one search engine and one of the top
companies in the world was never enough for Page and Brin their entrepreneurial spirit has
driven them to continually invest and improve the company as a whole.
The Innovation of Google
The innovation of Google came from their simplicity, search results, and search
algorithm to name a few. Looking at the main page of other search engines such as Yahoo! and
Bing, they are loaded with news, sports scores and other information. Google’s main page on the
other hand is simple, just a search engine box and the company’s logo. The simplicity of their
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main page is one of their greatest assets, no advertising, no news, nothing just a simple search
engine. When they first launched Google Beta, testers would sit there waiting for the rest of the
page to load, but to their surprise the search engine box and logo were in fact the page. Their
innovation has also come from acquiring other companies with technology that they have
integrated with their own products to improve their company’s services. Their search results
were more accurate than their competitions. Mark Malseed described how if you typed “Alta
Vista” into Alta Vista’s web search box the website couldn’t even find itself. If Google lacked
the technology they would simply just acquire a company who did have that technology, in what
could be described as some of the most genius entrepreneurial moves in business. Google has
been described as the leader of “innovation management”, “innovation capability” and in
“sustaining innovation” (Alange, 2013). Not only has their innovation perfected their search
engine, they have become innovative in their entrepreneurial enterprise with consistent mergers
and acquisitions with other companies, they have formed an innovative management philosophy
and business model, their corporate culture is the most innovative in history and their expansion
and success is unrivaled in the world today. Fast Company Magazine names Google the most
innovative company of 2014 stating the reason being “for becoming a $ 350 billion giant that lets
loose almost too many innovations and milestones to count” (Lidsky, 2014).
Management Team
The management of Google by Larry Page and Sergey Brin has also lead to much of their
success. These two men have brought their values and intelligence to the company in a way that
has brought the company a great corporate culture as well as a management philosophy like none
other. What made the management team so great were the checks and balances created not only
with the two founders but also with the addition of Eric Schmidt as CEO (Girard, 2009). This
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trio was able to do what one CEO could not, because when only one person is on the top there is
no one to correct them, nor are most CEO’s willing to listen to those working below them. When
you only have two people at the top and they have differing opinions then this will only create
tensions and can deter the company from meeting their overall goals and expectations. But when
there are three people at the top and two agree and one does not this creates a balanced approach
as with Google’s top three men.
Their business model has been describes as “managing on the edge” a part of Henderson
and Venkatraman’s four vectors of business model innovation (Henderson and Venkatraman,
2008). The authors also describe Google’s management as the best in the business at managing
on the edge. Not only have these three men expanded Google into numerous other markets
outside search engines, but have continuously acquired other companies with innovations and
technology to help compliment their rapidly growing company. The management has decided to
overcome the mundane culture that plagues many successful companies with all their perks
which they offer for free, they allow employees to spend time on their own self directed projects,
as well as encourage them to meet with and spend time with employees from other departments
to gain insight and ideas to improve their own departments and projects.
The Other Key Players of Google
One of the most genius things a business owner can do is to hire people smarter than
themselves. That is just what Google has done beginning with hiring Eric Schmidt as CEO for
his experience in business to their numerous other hiring’s (Elting, 2011). Google’s success is
attributable not just to Larry Page and Sergey Brin but the numerous employees who have
become key players within the company, some of the most intelligent people on earth. One
employee was quoted as saying that in his years at Stanford in Computer Sciences he used 12
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text books, the authors of ten of those text books worked at Google now. Marissa Meyer who
was the 20th
person hired by the company was the person who helped create the simplicity of
Google’s home page. David C. Drummond who joined Google in 2002 has a Juris Doctorate
from Stanford Law and is currently the Senior Vice president, Corporate Development and Chief
Legal Officer, began as serving as Google’s first outside counsel and helped the company in
securing their first rounds of funding. Patrick Pickette who joined in 2001 as the executive
president of planning and performance management is currently the company’s Chief Financial
officer with nearly 20 years of financial experience. The list of people who have helped Google
accomplish their success goes on and on with numerous people who are experts within their
fields.
Google’s Corporate Culture
Google has also developed a corporate culture that has put them on the top of Forbes
“best companies to work for” several times. Their Googleplex (which is 2.5 times the size of
Giants stadium) in Mountain View, California is their main office or campus as they call it. The
complex offers several perks including free food prepared by their own chefs with 18 cafes on
site. They provide transportation for those employees who do not drive, and they also have free
laundry service. They also provide their employees with massages, basketball courts, bowling
alleys, pool tables, exercise gym, a volley ball court and even adult playgrounds (Kim, 2013). In
addition they have an onsite doctor’s office on campus, free of charge for all employees. They
now employ over 47,000 people with over 40 offices worldwide. Their hiring process is aimed at
finding the brightest people they can find. Google is a very casual place to work for with no
dress code, you do not even have to shave (Bartiromo, 2009). If an employee has no car Google
offers them the use of their ReChargeit electrical cars, to run errands if need be. Google even has
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a policy brought up by Larry Page that their workers spend 20% of their time working self
directed projects many of which have become Google News and other expansions to their search
engine (Weber, 2007).With all the free food and entertainment many of their employees come to
work early and stay late, which gives Google a great return on their investment into their
employees.
Out of the 1 million applications they receive each year they actually only end up hiring
half a percent of all applicants. The application process not only attempts to find the applicants
technical skill level, but also their ability to think quick as well as their creative thought process.
Their human resources department called “People Operations” by Google uses strict analytics
and data to more precisely manage their people and teams. They have developed an algorithm
that helps them to determine which candidates and employees are more likely to stay with the
company and which are likely to leave. When Google ran into the problem of having woman
leave their company twice as much as men they were able to identify the reason which was their
maternity leave plan so they increased their paid time off from 12 weeks to 5 months and the rate
in which women began to leave dropped in half.
The company also cultivates a more democratic and casual environment for their
employees to work in. Their top managers are very hands on with not only their small number of
middle managers but also with their employees working directly under them. This lack of
hierarchy allows their employees to more freely express their ideas and opinions to upper
management. Google has also created employee engagement surveys which ask for every
employee’s feedback for ways to improve not only the company but the corporate culture within
the organization. This allows for a more thoughtful and democratic approach to the decision
making at the top level so that the employees at the bottom are not left out of important decisions
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made within the company. As Google admits this does not lead to unanimity but when decisions
are made based on input from all employees and based on date and feedback from those
employees, dissenters can see the data and results of those decisions as democratic and not just
made by those in power.
Problems
One of the main problems with Google has become their user’s privacy. Google’s users
search terms are stored for life and used to help with Google advertising and other services.
People feel comfortable in the privacy of their own home and in theory admit things to Google
that they would not admit to their best friends, doctor, psychologist or priest. While Google may
claim that user’s data is their own the laws do not protect this information and in fact legally no
one actually owns this date once it is stored on the internet. While the Fourth Amendment bars
the government from illegal search and seizure it does not protect information passed on to a
third party. The ECPA or Electronics Communications Privacy Act allows for the government to
call for users data without a search warrant (Brumfield, 2013). Google’s Director of Law
Enforcement and Information Security called it a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment but
under the law they must comply.
Sergey Brin, Larry Page and the Google Company have also bumped head with several
other technology giants including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Mostly due to their size and what
some believe is their going against their core belief and manta “Don’t be Evil”. After the launch
of their Android software for mobile phones in 2007 Google came head to head with Apple.
Steve Jobs who had been Page and Brin’s idol became so upset due to the launching of their own
mobile phone software that he in fact called Google’s mantra “Don’t Be Evil” and I quote “Bull
Sh*t” (Cabel, 2010). Jobs felt that the Google Company was attempting to kill his iPhone, as he
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stated we (Apple) didn’t enter the search business they (Google) entered the smart phone
business. Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google who had been on Apples board for three years
resigned from the company. Bill Gates, who accused Google of becoming a monopoly in the
search engine market, felt a relief when Google became “the new villain” as opposed to
Microsoft.
Nicolas Carr theorizes in an article entitled “Is Google making us stupid?” that the ease
of use of internet search is slowing down our brains (Carr, 2008). He himself had noticed that the
ease of reading a book has not become a more difficult task as he has become so accustomed to
finding information so easily on the internet. What once took laborious hours of reading
periodicals in a library can now be conducted within only a matter of minutes. While this may
seem like an advantage or a convenience what he theorizes is it has diminished our process of
thought and also shape our thought patterns as once proposed by media theorist Marshall
McLuhan in the 1960’s. So in theory the convenience of internet search has taken away from our
ability to focus on longer period of reading and Carr confirmed this theory with other
intellectuals who were experiencing the same difficulties. Dan Cohen a historian on the other
hand believes Google is the most valuable tool for researchers, and believes the company is
doing a good service for humanity (Cohen, 2011).
Google’s Success
Google has become one of if not the most successful company in history. Studies have
also showed that Google searches return much better results than do other search engines. For
example a four letter search on Google returned better and more accurate results than that of
Yahoo!, and this is due to the superior algorithm used by Google search engine (Seolutions,
2012). Google’s algorithm is described as more democratic, which means that newer sites can
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show up higher than older ones based on relevancy of information. Other sites have more
seniority for older sites as their algorithms cannot detect the relevancy of information as well as
Google’s. Google’s algorithm technology uses “spider crawlers” or a technology that wanders
the web and records all information, relevant or not. It then builds a list of words and where they
were found, which then is indexed by Google’s system of weighing relevancy, now this data is
available to the public in their searches (Franklin, 2014). The process is a bit more complicated
but that is basics of how the “spider crawlers” work. Google unlike other search engines create
results based on the number of visits to a site as well as users ratings of the site. The main
problem with both Yahoo! and Excite was that their searches would often return irrelevant
results usually from websites that had paid to show up high on the search results yet were
completely unrelated to the search query, and many times were nothing but smut websites, which
infuriated users. Google’s overall success is also attributable to their successful advertising
products which generate the majority of their revenues. Also they have remained successful due
to their entrepreneurial enterprising which has lead to the acquisition of numerous companies
which has allowed them to expand into new markets.
Expansion
Google has expanded beyond just the search engine market into numerous other ventures.
Google has acquired over 160 different companies and have expanded their company into
several departments focusing on new age technologies. They have expanded into mapping
technology, robotics, video services, online advertising, artificial intelligence, mobile device
manufacturing, mobile device software, social networking, and video gaming just to name a few
of the many markets Google has expanded into.
21

They have Google maps which allows for people to view any part of the globe on their
computer and to even use the application as a GPS. Their largest acquisition was that of
Motorola Mobility for $ 12.5 billion in 2011. They also acquired the mobile software Android in
2005 for $ 50,000,000. For the money Android was one of Google’s most successful acquisitions
as of 2013 over 900 million devices operated on Android (Bort, 2013). With these two
acquisitions as well as partnerships with companies such as Samsung, Acer, T-Mobile and others
have established a strong foothold in the mobile phone market.
Google’s social media website Google Plus as of 2013 has reached 540 million monthly
users and is the second largest social media site now behind Facebook (Associated Press, 2013).
They still fall well below Facebooks 1.2 billion users (or 693 million depending on how you
define active), but Google Plus is only 3 years old compared to Facebook which is ten years old.
With Facebook users becoming more and more concerned about Facebook privacy issues, if
Google can gain more public confidence in their respect for user’s privacy the company could
easily attract some of Facebooks users to their Google Plus social media page.
They now have their own robotics department Google X and have acquired several
robotic companies. Some of these companies include SHAFT Inc. a Japanese based company
that creates humanoid robotics; Deep Mind Technologies a U.K. based company that creates
artificial intelligence programs. They have also expanded into a Google Deepmind department
which is focused solely on artificial intelligence programming. Nestlabs was their second largest
acquisition costing them $ 3.2 billion. Nestlabs specializes in home automation. They also
recently acquired Dropcam for over half a billion which they incorporated into their Google
Nestlabs department, the company specialized in home monitoring.
22

Google’s expansions are numerous and number close to 200 businesses acquired. Google
in 2014 alone has already made over 30 acquisitions of other companies, which shows they have
no plans of slowing down on their expansion. With their increased revenues and profits they
have the ability to take on the risks of purchasing start up ventures and other companies. While
some fail the ones that are successful more than cover those losses.
Conclusion
Some experts believe that Google will one day be the only search engine in the market
and some even suggest Google will become the internet itself. This company has created over
1,000 millionaires and Page and Brin the two founders are among the wealthiest men on the
planet. As of 2014 Larry Page’s new worth is at $ 32.3 billion and Sergey Brin’s net worth is at $
31.8 billion, making them the 17th
and 19th
richest people in the world respectively (Dolan and
Kroll, 2014). 2014 saw Google again top the charts as the number one country in the world to
work for making its fifth appearance as number one and eight total appearances on the list
(Fortune, 2014). They were ranked number three in 2014 as the third Most Valuable Brands, just
behind Apple and Microsoft respectively at a value of $ 56.6 billion (Badenhausen, 2014).
For many people Google is the internet in a whole. Over a billion people are now using
Android to operate their mobile, Chrome iOS as their PC operating system, somewhere between
30 to 40% are using Google Chrome as their web browser (according to several estimates, some
indicating that Google Chrome use has surpassed that of Internet Explorer), 68% are using
Google as their search engine (Zeckman, 2014), also between the Android browser and Google
Chrome for mobile they control approximately 35% of the mobile web browsing market (CMO
Exclusive, 2014). This puts Google second in mobile phone web browsing market to iPhone
Safari with almost a 60% share. Google Plus is the second most visited social media site behind
23

Facebook. Everything Google does they are either number one at, or a very close number two.
The accomplishments of Google are astounding with no end in sight for the possibilities of their
expansion. This is a very impressive feat for two Stanford Grad school drop outs, who are now
two of the most successful men in the world.
24

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