Mis-Google, Facebook & Web Business Information

MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

CASE STUDY 2: GOOGLE, FACEBOOK & WEB BUSINESS INFORMATION

EFSTRATIOS PATSATZIS

October 28, 2012

• Facebook’s and Google’s early history. Comparing and contrasting them.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. He was nineteen years old then and he studied at Harvard University. Facebook was launched as a website where he and his classmates could visit and find notes, artwork, etc. It was working much more as a study guide. But it met great acceptance from his colleges and then from a huge number of people and was transformed from an inside information website to a huge global social network. There were several offers for Zuckerberg in order to sell his brilliant creature. So, in 2006 he refused to sell the firm to Viacom for $750 millions and to Google for $1 billion. But in 2007, he decided to sell only 1.6% of the firm to Microsoft for $240 millions. The value for the whole firm was $15 billions then. In 2011 it was estimated that the value of Facebook was $70 billions. Mark Zuckenberg now owns a 25% of the firm and he has the control of the company. In addition, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of the firm, runs the sales and has succeeded a great performance of the company due to her brilliant strategic management.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while both attended Stanford University. Together, Brin and Page own about 16 percent of the company's stake. The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software including email, an office suite, and social networking. Google now has achieved to earn a huge amount of dollars from advertising (much bigger from any other media company), while most of its services are...