Google Inc. Strategy Analysis

Google Inc. is a multinational public company with its headquarters in Mountain View, California; the company, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, owe its success to the Page and Brin’s search engine that instead of counting how many times a word appeared on a page, it analyze the relationship between websites, that is, a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.

Nowadays Google, with its 23’300 employees and an assets value of about 40 billion of U.S. Dollars, is the worldwide leader in internet and mobile search, it is controlling the market for search-based advertisement and it is investing in mobile and cloud computing applications.

But for the Mountain View’s Company, due to the exponential increase of internet users, the high competition in the information technology market and the restriction applied on internet use from some Governments, is becoming harder maintain its competitive advantage and it must find the best competitive strategy to do this.

In the web-search market Google has to deal with its competitors new technology, like Powerset’s semantic search technology acquired by Microsoft in 2008. Now this is too slow for the internet-search (it works just for Wikipedia’s research) compared with Google, but in the near future should be able to compete also in the web.

Google could maintain its competitive advantage since now thanks to its capability to return the best relevant results to search query, its simple and clear interface and, most of all, the advertisement on its web page is always correlated with the research query. Google is also able to target its ads to specific users based upon the user’s browsing history, indeed, this is the first of the 10 principles of the Company corporate philosophy.

Advertisement is crucial for Google, moreover because most of its revenues comes from the search-based advertisement and its search appliance....