Description
This report is about Google's success factors,
MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Google: What is so different about it?
Topical Study Report Draft
Submitted by
Group A
PGP - 1
T.A. PAI MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE
Manipal, Karnataka – 576104
Table of Contents
a. Introduction:........................................................................................................2 b. History of Google: ...............................................................................................3 c. Google Milestones:...............................................................................................3 d. The Google Mantra:..............................................................................................4 e. Description of Technology and Business..............................................................4 f. Other Differentiating Factors..............................................................................12 g. Other Google Products.......................................................................................16 h. Challenges faced by Google:..............................................................................17 i. Competitor’s moves:...........................................................................................17 j. Future Directions.................................................................................................18 k. Conclusion:.........................................................................................................19 l. References:.........................................................................................................20
a. Introduction:
Of all the unlimited uses that the World Wide Web can be to us on a daily basis, being a comprehensive source of information is the most vital and the most sought after service. While the internet has the potential to overload us with more than enough information to work on, browsing through nearly 200 million websites for finding the relevant information can be quite a tough job. In today’s business environment, time and information are arguably our two most precious resources. Yet most businesses squander both on a daily basis. The high costs to a company of not finding information, or of finding it too late, include faulty decisions, duplicated efforts, lost productivity, and missed opportunities. Thus, internet users regularly use ‘Search Engines’ or web portals that can search for websites containing the information that you are looking for, based on certain key words or phrases. In spite of the existence of a number of search
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engines on the internet, one name remains on the top of everyone’s mind as they intend to search the internet – www.google.com. Google is now just 10 years old, yet within five years of its birth the verb ‘to Google’ was firmly established as a universal shorthand for internet search. In this report, we shall see why Google is the best brand among search engines and what is so different about it which makes it what it is today.
b. History of Google:
In 1996, 2 Stanford graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin created a ‘web crawler’ called BackRub which was designed to traverse the web and search the titles of over 16 million URLs. BackRub, designed using Java and Python, began to use up the university’s bandwidth. They decide to tweak the search engine and also gave it a new name – Google, a play on the word ‘Googol’ – meaning 1 followed by 100 zeros. After obtaining monetary support from SUN Microsystems, Google filed for incorporation on September 4, 1998. And thus, Google began its journey to become the market leader in its category.
c. Google Milestones:
1996: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub later came to be called as Google. 1998: September - Google files for incorporation in California on September 4. 2000: June - Google becomes the world's largest search engine. December - Google Toolbar is released. 2004: January - Orkut launches as a way for Google to tap into the sphere of social networking. 2005: February - Google Maps goes live June - Google unveils Google Earth August – Google launches Google Talk 2006:
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October - Google announces acquisition of YouTube. 2007 November - Android, the first open platform for mobile devices and a collaboration with other companies in the Open Handset Alliance, is announced. 2008: September - Google celebrates 10 fast-paced years.
d. The Google Mantra:
Since the time of its inception Google has always stuck to its 3 principles strictly:
1. Fast, accurate search results - To be successful, enterprise search must be powerful
enough to deliver the most relevant information, consistently and efficiently, whenever and wherever it’s needed.
2. Minimal administrative overhead - Enterprise search must be quick enough to deploy and
easy enough to manage that the cost of installing and maintaining it won’t exceed the benefit.
3. An intelligible user interface - Enterprise search must be simple and effective enough that
users will actually use it.
e. Description of Technology and Business
Google is backed by good strategic leadership (and a shareholding structure that denies power to Wall Street); no corporate debt and the freedom that accompanies huge profits. Google heads toward $20 billion in sales this year, ranking No. 5 among the fastest-growing tech companies tracked by Business Week. In this part of the article we shall deal with three aspects of Google’s strength: 1. Web server farms 2. Google’s web page search algorithm – PAGERANK™ 3. Its business Strategy
1.1 Google’s Infrastructure – Server Farms:
Though the numbers are not publicly known, it is estimated that Google maintains over 450,000 custom-built servers, arranged in racks located in clusters in cities around the world,
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with major centers in California, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Tokyo, Beijing, China and new facilities constructed in Oregon. When an attempt to connect to Google is made, DNS servers resolve www.google.com to multiple IP addresses, which acts as a first level of load balancing by directing clients to different Google clusters. Each Google cluster has thousands of servers, and upon connection to a cluster further load balancing is performed by hardware in the cluster, in order to send the queries to the least loaded web server. This makes Google one of the biggest and most complex known content delivery networks.
1.2 Google search engine technology – PAGERANK™
Google’s search engine optimization technique is far better than any other technologies that had come before: so much better, in fact, that it changed the way many people use the web. Almost overnight, it made the web far more useful, particularly for non-specialist users, many of whom now regard Google as the internet's front door. Google has reached this stage because of the superior quality search results it produces in addition to the high performance and ease of use. This quality of search results is substantially based on PageRank, a sophisticated method to rank web pages. The PageRank Concept: Since the early stages of the World Wide Web, search engines have developed different methods to rank web pages. Until today, the occurrence of a search phrase within a page is one major factor within ranking techniques of virtually any search engine. The occurrence of a search phrase can thereby be weighted by the length of a page (ranking by keyword density) or by its accentuation within a page by HTML tags. What earlier search engines did was to scan or "crawl" a large portion of the web, build an index, and then find pages that matched particular words. But they were less good at presenting those hundreds of thousands pages in a useful way. For the purpose of better search results and especially to make search engines resistant against automatically generated web pages based upon the analysis of content specific ranking criteria (doorway pages), the concept of link popularity was developed. Following this concept, the number of inbound links for a page measures its general importance. Hence, a web page is generally more important, if many other web pages link to it. The concept of link popularity often avoids good rankings for pages which are only created to deceive search engines and which don't
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have any significance within the web, but numerous webmasters elude it by creating masses of inbound links for doorway pages from just as insignificant other web pages. Contrary to the concept of link popularity, PageRank is not simply based upon the total number of inbound links. The basic approach of PageRank is that a page is in fact considered the more important the more other pages link to it, but those inbound links do not count equally. First of all, a page ranks high in terms of PageRank, if other high ranking pages link to it. So, within the PageRank concept, the rank of a page is given by the rank of those pages which link to it. Their rank again is given by the rank of the pages which link to them. Hence, the PageRank of a page is always determined recursively by the PageRank of other pages. Since even if marginal and via many links - the rank of any page influences the rank of any other, PageRank is, in the end, based on the linking structure of the whole web. Although this approach seems to be very broad and complex, Page and Brin were able to put it into practice by using some mathematical tricks, resolve this circularity, and give a score to each page that reflects its importance. The simplest way to calculate the score for each page is to perform a repeating or "iterative" calculation. To start with, all pages are given the same score. Then each link from one page to another is counted as a "vote" for the destination page. Each page's score is recalculated by adding up the contribution from each incoming link, which is simply the score of the linking page divided by the number of outgoing links on that page. (Each page's score is thus shared out among the pages it links to.) Once all the scores have been recalculated, the process is repeated using the new scores, until the scores settle down and stop changing (in mathematical jargon, the calculation "converges"). The final scores can then be used to rank search results: pages that match a particular set of search terms are displayed in order of descending score, so that the page deemed most important appears at the top of the list. While this is the simplest way to perform the PageRank calculation, however, it is not the fastest. Google actually uses sophisticated techniques from a branch of mathematics known as linear algebra to perform the calculation in a single step. And the actual PageRank formula includes an extra "damping factor" to prevent pages' scores increasing indefinitely. Furthermore, the PageRank algorithm has been repeatedly modified from its original form to prevent people from gaming the system. Since Google's debut in 1998, the importance of a
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page's Google ranking, particularly for businesses that rely on search engines to send customers their way, has increased dramatically: Google is now responsible for one in three searches on the web. For this reason, an entire industry of "search-engine optimisers" has sprung up. For a fee, they will try to manipulate your page's ranking on Google and other search engines. The original PageRank algorithm could be manipulated in a fairly straightforward fashion, by creating a "link farm" of web pages that link to one another and to a target page, and thus give an inflated impression of its importance. So Google's original ranking algorithm has grown considerably more complicated, and is now able to identify and blacklist pages that try to exploit such tricks. Mr Page and Mr Brin made another important innovation early on. This was to consider the "anchor text"-the bit of text that is traditionally blue and underlined and forms a link from one page to another-as a part of the web page it referred to, as well as part of the page it was actually on. They reasoned that the anchor text served as an extremely succinct, if imprecise, summary of the page it referred to. This further helps to ensure that when searching for the name of a person or company, the appropriate website appears at the top of the list of results. Ranking the order in which results are returned was the area in which Google made the most improvement, but it is only one element of search-and it is useless unless the rest of the search engine works efficiently. In practice, that means compiling a comprehensive and up-todate index of the web's ever-changing pages. PageRank sits on top of Google's extremely powerful and efficient search infrastructure-one that draws on the lessons learned from previous, and now mostly forgotten, search engines. When you perform a Google search, you are not actually searching the web, but rather an index of the copy of the web stored on Google's servers. The index is compiled from all the pages that have been returned by a multitude of spiders that crawl the web, gathering pages, extracting all the links from each page, putting them in a list, sorting the links in the list in order of priority (thus balancing breadth and depth) and then gathering the next page from the list. When a user types in a query, the search terms are looked up in the index (using a variety of techniques to distribute the work across tens of thousands of computers) and the results are then returned from a separate set of document servers (which provide preview "snippets" of matching pages from Google's copies of the web), along with advertisements, which are returned from yet another set of servers. All of these bits are assembled, with the help of PageRank, into
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the page of search results. Google manages to do this cheaply, in less than a second, using computers built from cheap, off-the-shelf components and linked together in a reliable and speedy way using Google's own clever software. Together, its thousands of machines form an enormous supercomputer, optimised to do one thing-find, sort and extract web-based information-extremely well. How PageRank works: The PageRank of each page depends on the PageRank of the pages pointing to it. But we won’t know what PageRank those pages have until the pages pointing to them have their PageRank calculated and so on… And when you consider that page links can form circles it seems impossible to do this calculation! But actually it’s not that bad. Remember this bit of the Google paper: PageRank or PageRank(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web. What that means to us is that we can just go ahead and calculate a page’s PageRank without knowing the final value of the PageRank of the other pages. That seems strange but, basically, each time we run the calculation we’re getting a closer estimate of the final value. So all we need to do is remember the each value we calculate and repeat the calculations lots of times until the numbers stop changing much. In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there’s no link there’s no support (but it’s an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page). Quoting from the original Google paper, PageRank is defined like this: We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows: PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) 1. Google's PageRank algorithm is a mathematical recipe that uses the structure of the links between web pages to assign a score to each page that reflects its importance. In effect, each link from one page to another is counted as a "vote" for the destination page, and each page's score
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depends on the scores of the pages that link to it. But those pages' scores, in turn, depend on the scores of the pages that link to them, and so on. As a result, calculating the scores is a complicated business. 2. Initially, all pages are given the same score (in this case, 100 points). 3. Each page's score is recalculated by adding up the score from each incoming link, which is simply the score of the linking page divided by the number of outgoing links. The "About us" page, for example, has one incoming link, from the "Home" page. The "Home" page has two outgoing links, so its score of 100 is shared equally between them. The "About us" page therefore ends us with a score of 50. Similarly, the "Our products" page has three incoming links. Each comes from a page with two outgoing links, and therefore contributes 50 to the "Our products" page's total score of 150. 4. Once all the scores have been recalculated, the process is repeated using the new scores, until the scores stop changing. In fact, Google uses sophisticated mathematical techniques to speed up the calculation, rather than performing multiple calculations across the entire web. 5. The final scores are used to rank the results of a search, which are displayed in order of descending score. The "Home" page ends up with the highest score, so that searching for "Widgets.com", which appears in every page, produces a list with the "Home" page at the top. Similarly, searching for "Product A" or "Product B" produces a list with the "Our products" page at the top, since this page has a higher score than either of the individual product pages.
1.3 Business Strategy:
The primary business revenue model of Google is search related advertising. Although Google had launched many other products like Google Chrome & Google Picasa to name a few, their primary focus had always been on searching activities. With annual revenues of $5.19 billion for the quarter ended March31, 2008, Google is the undisputed numero uno web search engine. Within 10 years of its inception, one of the factors that enabled Google achieve this phenomenal growth is their sound business model. The key features of their business strategy are as follows:
Primary focus on searching activities
Google`s primary business model is search related advertising. Providing search activities is its core competency. Still now, most of its revenues are from search related activities. Google
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says it processes nearly 150 million searches a day. Although coming up with many new products, Google ensures that nothing gets in the way of the users` search convenience. On top of that, Google always strives to improve its search results along with decreasing the search time.
Free-service model of operation
Google believes that free is better than cheap. It believes that free business models actually come up with additional revenue sources. Free is a viable business model with branding advantages, service and other things. As Goggle`s CEO, Mr. Eric Schmidt puts it, “A rule of economics is that for manufacturing and mature businesses, eventually the price of the good goes to the marginal cost of its production and distribution. Well, in the digital world, for digital goods, the marginal cost of distribution and manufacture is effectively zero or near zero. So, certainly, for that category of goods, it's reasonable to expect that the free model with ancillary branding and revenue opportunities is probably a very good thing.” Recently, Google has released their browser free of cost. On top of that, they are also showing their source code to anyone who wants to look under the hood. They were dissatisfied with the current browsers on the market today and were looking for a way to force them to update and get with the times, i.e., Security, Speed & Usability), so they released their own and set the bar. They are doing all this for free because their aim is to pull more people towards the internet. If the amount of people using the internet increases, then Google wins. The free business model also enables it to kill competition and keep itself ahead in the race.
Constant innovation and launch of new products
Over the years, Google had added a plethora of new products to its name. Starting from Google news service to software packages like Google Earth, it is flooding its users with high utility software and services. Through this strategy, Google targets to increase its loyal customer base and also to have a strong association with its customers. It is making the customers get used to and heavily dependent on its products. Not only does it provide new products, but Google also emphasizes strict monitoring and constant improvement of its products to offer nothing but the best to its customers.
Beta launches of new products
Many a times while visiting one of Google`s sites did we come across the term beta. Many a times we have wondered, ‘What is it?’ A Beta launch is the launch of a product for the purpose of testing. This is one of the unique features of Google and Google uses it to its full
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potential. Whenever Google comes up with a new product, it initially goes for a beta launch of that very product. Beta launches have certain advantages. First of all, it reduces the lead time for Google to launch a product. Secondly, it provides a large testing platform for that product. Users are encouraged to use that product. They provide valuable feedbacks that help Google to improve and tweak the existing product. Beta launches also helps in creating awareness about the product among the masses.
Gradual shift from end-of-network activities to middleof-network
In November 2007, Google entered into mobile phone networking. The cited strategy is to extend Google`s business model to hand held devices. Through this move, Google appears to be promoting a significant shift from information storage, processing and transport primarily managed at the edge of the network into the middle of the network. By providing server-based services that connect to end-user devices, Google can grab business from Microsoft, the Telco, and other Telecom/IT companies. Mobile devices will also act as a key interlink among a wide variety of information Google-managed tools (applications that coordinate among car navigation, desktop computers, home theatres, point-of-sale payment devices, etc.). With Google placed well in the middle of digital information flows, it would have accompanied it`s goal of bringing knowledge to anyone, anywhere and anytime. This will in turn raise advertising revenues for Google.
Complementary advantage to its core business
The sheer breadth of Google`s activities makes it the potential competitors of many businesses including software houses, advertising agencies, telephone companies, newspapers, TV networks, book publishers, movie studios, credit card processors, and Internet firms of all stripes. Even financial advisors, doctors, and librarians eye the company warily. However Google`s business model is quite straightforward. More than 99% of its revenues has come from advertisers who post messages on Google`s website. Google`s products actually serve as complements to its main business model. As more and more products are being launched by Google, more people are getting drawn to its sites. Hence, more advertisers and in turn, more revenues are generated. On top of that, Google gets to collect more data on user activities, trends and tastes. This, in turn, enables Google to modify its existing products according to user preferences and also come up with new products suiting users.
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Aggressive acquisition of sites like Orkut and YouTube
Many of the most and innovative and successful of Google`s new products are the ones that it has acquires rather than created. The products include the hugely popular video-sharing service YouTube, the Weblog publisher Blogger, the virtual globe Google Earth, the online word processor Writely (renamed Google Docs), the wiki developer JotSpot, the news syndication service Feedburner, and the Internet phone service GrandCentral. When it comes to innovation, Google is looking more than an exploiter than an inventor. This is natural and very much required for a fast growing organization.
Low cost base
The rising sale of complementary products has helped Google to hugely reduce its cost. Nearly everything the company does, including building big data centers, buying optical fiber, promoting free Wi-Fi access, fighting copyright restrictions, supporting open source software, and giving away Web services and data, is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. More so, with freely available information, Google incurs almost no cost to assemble the information and cater it to the users. More so, the marginal cost of producing and distributing a purely digital product is close to zero. On top of that, launching of beta-products has enabled Google to bring down the cost of failure to close to zero.
f. Other Differentiating Factors
1.4 Paving a way for clean and green IT:
Google has taken steps to ensure that their operations are environmentally sound. In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide up to 1.6 MW of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs. The system will be the largest solar power system constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world. This initiative has been criticized as an attempt by Google to cover up or make up for the massive amounts of energy their servers actually require. Google has also started a strategic initiative “Re<C” whose mission is to develop electricity from renewable sources cheaper than electricity produced from coal. This project to
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create renewable energy cheaper than coal focuses on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, and enhanced geothermal systems. Through this initiative Google has embraced the challenge of developing a 1 GW of renewable electricity that is cheaper than electricity from coal in years, not decades. Through design improvements and the adoption of power-saving technologies, such as evaporative cooling, Google has made great strides to bolster the efficiency of its data centers. They are also cooperating with members of the tech community to improve efficiency on a broader scale. They have teamed with Intel and other industry partners to form a “Climate Savers Computing Initiative”, a group which advocates the design and adoption of less wasteful computing infrastructure. RechargeIT is an initiative by Google that aims to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use, and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles. They have a demonstration fleet of plug-ins at their headquarters in Mountain View, and they are collecting and posting data on plug-in performance, investing in innovative technologies, and advocating for the passage of important legislation.
1.5 Work Culture:
Google has a highly decentralized work culture. It does not believe in centralization and concentration of too much power in one`s hand. As Google`s core competency lies in innovation and breakthrough in technology, it needs to provide enough flexibility to its employees to experiment and come up with new products. As Craig Silverstein, a 30-year-old engineer who dropped his pursuit of a Stanford PhD to become Google's first employee puts it, “Flexibility is expensive. But we think that flexibility gives you a better product. More important, that's the sort of company I want to work for.” To be a part of Google, one has to dream. Simply putting it, Google operates in much the same way that a science department operates in a big research university. There are a few rules that Google has incorporated and they define its work culture. They are as follows:
The User is in charge
Google emphasizes to satisfy each user every single day. Each of Google`s products are designed and created by keeping the users` convenience in mind. Google aims at increasing
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users` productivity with each new modification. As Google fellow Urz Holzle puts it, “We count bytes. We count them because our users have modems, so it costs them to download our pages.” Google emphasizes that it has only one product. That`s search. People come to Google to search the web and Google makes sure that the users are not distracted from that search. This is the level of commitment and value that Google provides to its users. Google pays attention to the minute details of customer satisfaction and complaints. In fact, it has ten full time employees who does nothing but read emails from users, distributing them to the appropriate colleagues or respond to them themselves. "Nearly everyone has access to user feedback," says Monika Henzinger, Google's director of research. "We all know what the problem areas are, where users are complaining." Google enjoys a unique understanding of its users and a unique loyalty.
The world is your R&D Lab
Google is basically, a house of geeks. It heavily encourages its employees to play with various technologies and come up with a unique product. Recently, Paul Bausch, a 29 year old web developer, helped Google create a blogger, a widely used program that helped people set up their own web log. Following this, Google has encouraged its engineers to fool around with the product at their own will. It had given them the freedom to come up with a better product and also to give them the space to exercise their creativity. "Google knows how to make geeks feel good about being geeks," says Cory Doctorow, prominent geek, blogger, and technology propagandist.
Failures are good. Good failures are better
In Google Labs, just two clicks away from its home page, anyone can test-drive Google Viewer, sort of a motion-picture version of your search results, or Voice Search, a tool that lets one phone in a query and then see your results online. This example cites that Google allows for experimentation, and for failure. Google employees understand that not everything will work. Google has offered them the space to tell it what`s great and what`s not, and what will work better. "Unlike most other companies," observes Matthew Berk, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research, Google has said, 'We're going to try things, and some aren't going to work. That's okay. If it doesn't work, we'll move on.' “In the field of technology, failures are inevitable. Google understands it and believes that failures are the gateway to perfection. Failures are good. But good failures are even better. They have two advantages. People can carry forward the learning from the failures to their next project. And failing early reduces the overall cost.
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Great people can manage themselves
Google lays great importance on recruiting the right people. It spends more time on hiring than on anything else. On an average, Google receives 1,500 resumes a day from wanna-beGooglers. In each of the 300 people that it hired in 2002, Google invested 87 people hours. Google looks for young risk takers. And Google also hires the best brains. It has continuously managed to hire 90% of the best search engine people in the world. As a top Google executive puts it, “The challenge is negotiating the tension between risk and caution”. At first, Google hired managers and also gave management training to its employees. But that put a financial and operational barrier in front of the employees. It send across a message, ‘No you can`t do that’. So, Google got rid of its managers. Now, most engineers work in teams of three, with project leadership rotating among team members. If something goes wrong, including products that have already gone public, the teams fix it on their own, even without asking anyone. "For a while," Rosing says, "I had 160 direct reports. No managers. It worked because the teams knew what they had to do. That set a cultural bit in people's heads: You are the boss. Don't wait to take the hill. Don't wait to be managed." Google gives everyone the space to accommodate failures. If something fails, the employees are encouraged to move on with the next thing. Google has faith in the ability of its smart, well motivated employees to do the proper thing.
If Users come, so will the money
Google does not believe in strategic planning. Innovation at Google is totally left to the ideas of its brilliant employees. CEO Eric Schmidt hasn't decreed which technologies his engineers should dabble in or which products they must deliver. The ideas are judged solely on their popularity and utility. Here`s one example. In December 2001, researcher Krishna Bharat came out with a dynamic news service. Bharat`s news search engine scours for 20 news source every hour and automatically comes up with the most updated news and the hottest gossips in town. This project got a lot of attention in Google and was soon posted on the web after modifying it to include 155 news sources instead of 20. Within three weeks, the news engine was getting a whopping 70,000 users a day. Google puts its innovations on public display to identify failures quickly. It also helps to identify winners. As Sullivan puts it, “At some point, all of this great stuff has to turn a profit.” For the first 18 months of its existence, Google didn't make a penny from its basic Web-search service. After that, users started to pour in. Google believes that if enough users like its product, it will have huge popularity among advertisers. This will in turn
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lead to an inflow of cash. Says Mayer: "Our motto here is there’s no such thing as success-failure on the Net. In other words, if users win, then Google wins. Long live democracy.” Above all, Google teaches us, through both its successes and its failures that smart companies — the ones that are not only consistently innovative but consistently profitable — exhibit three qualities. They hire talented people and give them room to excel. They measure progress and results rigorously and make course adjustments quickly. And they remain disciplined in their work and their spending.
g. Other Google Products
When Google wasn’t satisfied with dominating Internet searches and wanted to tackle the biggest online activity – the email and introduced Gmail, they sensed opportunities in various other areas where they successfully made marks either by developing new products or by acquisitions.
•
Google Email – or Gmail as it is popularly known is the first email service to give Google Talk or GTalk – an instant messaging service tool also providing unlimited file Google Checkout – facilitates secure and easy online credit card purchases for Google Google Calendar – an online calendar that can be used for both personal and shared usage. Google Docs – online file sharing suite for document, presentation or spreadsheet files. Google Maps Google Earth Google Desktop iGoogle Orkut Youtube Picassa Web Albums Google Chrome – web browser
virtually unlimited storage space and features like organizing of mails as conversations. • • • • • • • • • • • • transfers and VOIP client features. users in the US and Canada
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h. Challenges faced by Google:
From a tiny company with a big idea to a corporate giant, Google has seen a super-fast growth and mega-success. Now THAT Google Inc. has reached its 10-year mark, the company is facing the cultural complexities and challenges that come with the transition from hip start-up to corporate giant.
1.
But now key employees of the brain trust have left it to join other companies. Key
Googlers such as former CIO Doug Merrill and Sheryi Sandberg, former vice president of global online sales and operations, have left the company in the past year
2.
Stories of employee dissatisfaction about its corporate culture are beginning to travel
throughout the industry. People who have left the company recently say that they felt disposable and easily replaced. They also say that the long days and hard work
3.
As Google ages, one of its main challenges is to continue to foster technology innovation It is finding it difficult to allow people to be creative
and draw the caliber of talent that start-ups can attract.
4.
1.6 Google’s Response measures:
Google tries to provide autonomy to people by allowing teams working on certain projects the same creative and development freedom they might have if they were still working for a start-up.
i. Competitor’s moves:
With fierce competition existing between Microsoft and Google what new features can Microsoft possibly introduce that will help it overtake Google in search and retain its domination of productivity software such as Office? Microsoft's secret weapon in Windows 7 is not what features the operating system has, but instead what features it doesn’t have. Microsoft is stripping Windows 7 of some of Windows best built-in applications, and it's making them available only as downloads on its Windows Live site. When Windows 7 comes out, it won't include Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker, which are some of Vista's most useful applications, Windows Movie Maker is a surprisingly sophisticated piece of software for creating videos and DVDs, and it's worthy of being sold as stand-alone software. Windows Photo Gallery is a well-done, elegant way to manage digital photos. And Windows Mail is the
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successor to Outlook Express, with a very big installed base. Expect users to howl in protest when they find those applications gone, particularly Windows Mail. To get them, users will have to visit the Microsoft Windows Live site, where the software can be downloaded for free. And, of course, there will be plenty of other Windows Live software they can download, as well as other Windows Live services they can use. It's a variation on the classic "loss leader" in retail, where you lure folks in with freebies and then pounce with a hard sell. Microsoft claims that it is stripping the applications out of Windows 7 because it makes for a "cleaner” operating system.
j. Future Directions
1.7 ANDROID: Mobile Operating System:
The android operating system is an open platform developed by Google® to power mobile devices and handsets. The idea behind the platform is to align technology companies with mobile companies to produce an open operating system that can be updated by any developer to improve the product for its users. Applications created to run on the android operating system are written using the Java programming language and will run on a custom developed virtual machine environment running on top of a Linux kernel. The development of the android operating system takes place through the use of a software development kit (SDK) provided by Google®. Developers can use this kit to create applications that work with the android platform to bring other applications in addition to those included with the android operating system itself.
1.8 Outsourcing:
Google has gone for several acquisitions and has entered into partnerships with several companies to help it in bettering its production and services. In 2004, Google acquired a company called Keyhole, Inc. which developed a product called Earth Viewer which was renamed in 2005 to Google Earth. Also, in 2006, Google bought the online video site YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock and JotSpot, a developer of wiki technology for collaborative Web sites. Google has had a partnership with “NASA Ames Research Center” to build offices and work on research projects involving large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed
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computing, and the entrepreneurial space industry. Google has tied up with Sun Microsystems in October to help share and distribute each other's technologies. The company entered into a partnership with AOL to enhance each other's video search services. Google is also in a partnership with GeoEye for providing Google with high-resolution imagery for Google Earth. Google launched, "Adsense for Mobile", a service focusing on mobile text ads by acquiring a mobile social networking site, Zingku.mobi to provide people with information on the move. Google has kept outsourcing as the last option at several occasions. But now, it is also trying to leverage on the power of outsourcing. Google is considering outsourcing some of its IT infrastructure to Sun Microsystems which is specialized in lowering the electric power consumption in the huge data centers. Google is also planning to outsource its "critical financial functions" which include billing, credit evaluation and collections. Google does not have the experience or person-power to track the millions of agreements it has made while it continues to base its bottom line on revenues generated through these agreements.
k. Conclusion:
In today’s business climate, no organization can afford wasted time, lost value, and missed opportunities. Connecting people to the relevant information they need – quickly, easily, and accurately – empowers Google’s users and offers their organization significant bottom-line benefits. And that is what Google is exactly doing. While Google's success has prompted its competitors to follow suit, its trail of high-margin profits and surging revenue may not continue at its current pace, the company and analysts warned. Whether their business model will help them sustain in the days to come; only time will tell.
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l. References:
1.9 Journal Articles:
1. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – submitted by Sergey
Brin and Lawrence Page, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
2. Android Calling – MIT Technology Review, April 2008
1.10 Magazine Articles:
1. Can Anything Derail Google's Growth Engine? - Rayport, Jeffrey F., Business Week
Online, September 28, 2008
2. Microsoft’s Secret weapon against Google – Preston Gralla, Computerworld, October 27,
2008
1.11 News Articles:
1. Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine – Saul Hansel, NewYorkTimes, June 3, 2007 2. Search Me! – David Carr, BusinessLine, December 1, 2008 3. Where does Google go now – John Naughton, Management Today
1.12 Books:
1. The Google Story – David A. Vise, PAN Books
1.13 Websites:
1. Simplicity and Enterprise Search - http://www.google.com 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google 3. https://www.howstuffworks.com 4. http://www.google.org/recharge/ 5. http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/ 6. https://www.wisegeek.com
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doc_445020712.doc
This report is about Google's success factors,
MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Google: What is so different about it?
Topical Study Report Draft
Submitted by
Group A
PGP - 1
T.A. PAI MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE
Manipal, Karnataka – 576104
Table of Contents
a. Introduction:........................................................................................................2 b. History of Google: ...............................................................................................3 c. Google Milestones:...............................................................................................3 d. The Google Mantra:..............................................................................................4 e. Description of Technology and Business..............................................................4 f. Other Differentiating Factors..............................................................................12 g. Other Google Products.......................................................................................16 h. Challenges faced by Google:..............................................................................17 i. Competitor’s moves:...........................................................................................17 j. Future Directions.................................................................................................18 k. Conclusion:.........................................................................................................19 l. References:.........................................................................................................20
a. Introduction:
Of all the unlimited uses that the World Wide Web can be to us on a daily basis, being a comprehensive source of information is the most vital and the most sought after service. While the internet has the potential to overload us with more than enough information to work on, browsing through nearly 200 million websites for finding the relevant information can be quite a tough job. In today’s business environment, time and information are arguably our two most precious resources. Yet most businesses squander both on a daily basis. The high costs to a company of not finding information, or of finding it too late, include faulty decisions, duplicated efforts, lost productivity, and missed opportunities. Thus, internet users regularly use ‘Search Engines’ or web portals that can search for websites containing the information that you are looking for, based on certain key words or phrases. In spite of the existence of a number of search
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engines on the internet, one name remains on the top of everyone’s mind as they intend to search the internet – www.google.com. Google is now just 10 years old, yet within five years of its birth the verb ‘to Google’ was firmly established as a universal shorthand for internet search. In this report, we shall see why Google is the best brand among search engines and what is so different about it which makes it what it is today.
b. History of Google:
In 1996, 2 Stanford graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin created a ‘web crawler’ called BackRub which was designed to traverse the web and search the titles of over 16 million URLs. BackRub, designed using Java and Python, began to use up the university’s bandwidth. They decide to tweak the search engine and also gave it a new name – Google, a play on the word ‘Googol’ – meaning 1 followed by 100 zeros. After obtaining monetary support from SUN Microsystems, Google filed for incorporation on September 4, 1998. And thus, Google began its journey to become the market leader in its category.
c. Google Milestones:
1996: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub later came to be called as Google. 1998: September - Google files for incorporation in California on September 4. 2000: June - Google becomes the world's largest search engine. December - Google Toolbar is released. 2004: January - Orkut launches as a way for Google to tap into the sphere of social networking. 2005: February - Google Maps goes live June - Google unveils Google Earth August – Google launches Google Talk 2006:
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October - Google announces acquisition of YouTube. 2007 November - Android, the first open platform for mobile devices and a collaboration with other companies in the Open Handset Alliance, is announced. 2008: September - Google celebrates 10 fast-paced years.
d. The Google Mantra:
Since the time of its inception Google has always stuck to its 3 principles strictly:
1. Fast, accurate search results - To be successful, enterprise search must be powerful
enough to deliver the most relevant information, consistently and efficiently, whenever and wherever it’s needed.
2. Minimal administrative overhead - Enterprise search must be quick enough to deploy and
easy enough to manage that the cost of installing and maintaining it won’t exceed the benefit.
3. An intelligible user interface - Enterprise search must be simple and effective enough that
users will actually use it.
e. Description of Technology and Business
Google is backed by good strategic leadership (and a shareholding structure that denies power to Wall Street); no corporate debt and the freedom that accompanies huge profits. Google heads toward $20 billion in sales this year, ranking No. 5 among the fastest-growing tech companies tracked by Business Week. In this part of the article we shall deal with three aspects of Google’s strength: 1. Web server farms 2. Google’s web page search algorithm – PAGERANK™ 3. Its business Strategy
1.1 Google’s Infrastructure – Server Farms:
Though the numbers are not publicly known, it is estimated that Google maintains over 450,000 custom-built servers, arranged in racks located in clusters in cities around the world,
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with major centers in California, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Tokyo, Beijing, China and new facilities constructed in Oregon. When an attempt to connect to Google is made, DNS servers resolve www.google.com to multiple IP addresses, which acts as a first level of load balancing by directing clients to different Google clusters. Each Google cluster has thousands of servers, and upon connection to a cluster further load balancing is performed by hardware in the cluster, in order to send the queries to the least loaded web server. This makes Google one of the biggest and most complex known content delivery networks.
1.2 Google search engine technology – PAGERANK™
Google’s search engine optimization technique is far better than any other technologies that had come before: so much better, in fact, that it changed the way many people use the web. Almost overnight, it made the web far more useful, particularly for non-specialist users, many of whom now regard Google as the internet's front door. Google has reached this stage because of the superior quality search results it produces in addition to the high performance and ease of use. This quality of search results is substantially based on PageRank, a sophisticated method to rank web pages. The PageRank Concept: Since the early stages of the World Wide Web, search engines have developed different methods to rank web pages. Until today, the occurrence of a search phrase within a page is one major factor within ranking techniques of virtually any search engine. The occurrence of a search phrase can thereby be weighted by the length of a page (ranking by keyword density) or by its accentuation within a page by HTML tags. What earlier search engines did was to scan or "crawl" a large portion of the web, build an index, and then find pages that matched particular words. But they were less good at presenting those hundreds of thousands pages in a useful way. For the purpose of better search results and especially to make search engines resistant against automatically generated web pages based upon the analysis of content specific ranking criteria (doorway pages), the concept of link popularity was developed. Following this concept, the number of inbound links for a page measures its general importance. Hence, a web page is generally more important, if many other web pages link to it. The concept of link popularity often avoids good rankings for pages which are only created to deceive search engines and which don't
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have any significance within the web, but numerous webmasters elude it by creating masses of inbound links for doorway pages from just as insignificant other web pages. Contrary to the concept of link popularity, PageRank is not simply based upon the total number of inbound links. The basic approach of PageRank is that a page is in fact considered the more important the more other pages link to it, but those inbound links do not count equally. First of all, a page ranks high in terms of PageRank, if other high ranking pages link to it. So, within the PageRank concept, the rank of a page is given by the rank of those pages which link to it. Their rank again is given by the rank of the pages which link to them. Hence, the PageRank of a page is always determined recursively by the PageRank of other pages. Since even if marginal and via many links - the rank of any page influences the rank of any other, PageRank is, in the end, based on the linking structure of the whole web. Although this approach seems to be very broad and complex, Page and Brin were able to put it into practice by using some mathematical tricks, resolve this circularity, and give a score to each page that reflects its importance. The simplest way to calculate the score for each page is to perform a repeating or "iterative" calculation. To start with, all pages are given the same score. Then each link from one page to another is counted as a "vote" for the destination page. Each page's score is recalculated by adding up the contribution from each incoming link, which is simply the score of the linking page divided by the number of outgoing links on that page. (Each page's score is thus shared out among the pages it links to.) Once all the scores have been recalculated, the process is repeated using the new scores, until the scores settle down and stop changing (in mathematical jargon, the calculation "converges"). The final scores can then be used to rank search results: pages that match a particular set of search terms are displayed in order of descending score, so that the page deemed most important appears at the top of the list. While this is the simplest way to perform the PageRank calculation, however, it is not the fastest. Google actually uses sophisticated techniques from a branch of mathematics known as linear algebra to perform the calculation in a single step. And the actual PageRank formula includes an extra "damping factor" to prevent pages' scores increasing indefinitely. Furthermore, the PageRank algorithm has been repeatedly modified from its original form to prevent people from gaming the system. Since Google's debut in 1998, the importance of a
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page's Google ranking, particularly for businesses that rely on search engines to send customers their way, has increased dramatically: Google is now responsible for one in three searches on the web. For this reason, an entire industry of "search-engine optimisers" has sprung up. For a fee, they will try to manipulate your page's ranking on Google and other search engines. The original PageRank algorithm could be manipulated in a fairly straightforward fashion, by creating a "link farm" of web pages that link to one another and to a target page, and thus give an inflated impression of its importance. So Google's original ranking algorithm has grown considerably more complicated, and is now able to identify and blacklist pages that try to exploit such tricks. Mr Page and Mr Brin made another important innovation early on. This was to consider the "anchor text"-the bit of text that is traditionally blue and underlined and forms a link from one page to another-as a part of the web page it referred to, as well as part of the page it was actually on. They reasoned that the anchor text served as an extremely succinct, if imprecise, summary of the page it referred to. This further helps to ensure that when searching for the name of a person or company, the appropriate website appears at the top of the list of results. Ranking the order in which results are returned was the area in which Google made the most improvement, but it is only one element of search-and it is useless unless the rest of the search engine works efficiently. In practice, that means compiling a comprehensive and up-todate index of the web's ever-changing pages. PageRank sits on top of Google's extremely powerful and efficient search infrastructure-one that draws on the lessons learned from previous, and now mostly forgotten, search engines. When you perform a Google search, you are not actually searching the web, but rather an index of the copy of the web stored on Google's servers. The index is compiled from all the pages that have been returned by a multitude of spiders that crawl the web, gathering pages, extracting all the links from each page, putting them in a list, sorting the links in the list in order of priority (thus balancing breadth and depth) and then gathering the next page from the list. When a user types in a query, the search terms are looked up in the index (using a variety of techniques to distribute the work across tens of thousands of computers) and the results are then returned from a separate set of document servers (which provide preview "snippets" of matching pages from Google's copies of the web), along with advertisements, which are returned from yet another set of servers. All of these bits are assembled, with the help of PageRank, into
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the page of search results. Google manages to do this cheaply, in less than a second, using computers built from cheap, off-the-shelf components and linked together in a reliable and speedy way using Google's own clever software. Together, its thousands of machines form an enormous supercomputer, optimised to do one thing-find, sort and extract web-based information-extremely well. How PageRank works: The PageRank of each page depends on the PageRank of the pages pointing to it. But we won’t know what PageRank those pages have until the pages pointing to them have their PageRank calculated and so on… And when you consider that page links can form circles it seems impossible to do this calculation! But actually it’s not that bad. Remember this bit of the Google paper: PageRank or PageRank(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web. What that means to us is that we can just go ahead and calculate a page’s PageRank without knowing the final value of the PageRank of the other pages. That seems strange but, basically, each time we run the calculation we’re getting a closer estimate of the final value. So all we need to do is remember the each value we calculate and repeat the calculations lots of times until the numbers stop changing much. In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there’s no link there’s no support (but it’s an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page). Quoting from the original Google paper, PageRank is defined like this: We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows: PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) 1. Google's PageRank algorithm is a mathematical recipe that uses the structure of the links between web pages to assign a score to each page that reflects its importance. In effect, each link from one page to another is counted as a "vote" for the destination page, and each page's score
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depends on the scores of the pages that link to it. But those pages' scores, in turn, depend on the scores of the pages that link to them, and so on. As a result, calculating the scores is a complicated business. 2. Initially, all pages are given the same score (in this case, 100 points). 3. Each page's score is recalculated by adding up the score from each incoming link, which is simply the score of the linking page divided by the number of outgoing links. The "About us" page, for example, has one incoming link, from the "Home" page. The "Home" page has two outgoing links, so its score of 100 is shared equally between them. The "About us" page therefore ends us with a score of 50. Similarly, the "Our products" page has three incoming links. Each comes from a page with two outgoing links, and therefore contributes 50 to the "Our products" page's total score of 150. 4. Once all the scores have been recalculated, the process is repeated using the new scores, until the scores stop changing. In fact, Google uses sophisticated mathematical techniques to speed up the calculation, rather than performing multiple calculations across the entire web. 5. The final scores are used to rank the results of a search, which are displayed in order of descending score. The "Home" page ends up with the highest score, so that searching for "Widgets.com", which appears in every page, produces a list with the "Home" page at the top. Similarly, searching for "Product A" or "Product B" produces a list with the "Our products" page at the top, since this page has a higher score than either of the individual product pages.
1.3 Business Strategy:
The primary business revenue model of Google is search related advertising. Although Google had launched many other products like Google Chrome & Google Picasa to name a few, their primary focus had always been on searching activities. With annual revenues of $5.19 billion for the quarter ended March31, 2008, Google is the undisputed numero uno web search engine. Within 10 years of its inception, one of the factors that enabled Google achieve this phenomenal growth is their sound business model. The key features of their business strategy are as follows:
Primary focus on searching activities
Google`s primary business model is search related advertising. Providing search activities is its core competency. Still now, most of its revenues are from search related activities. Google
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says it processes nearly 150 million searches a day. Although coming up with many new products, Google ensures that nothing gets in the way of the users` search convenience. On top of that, Google always strives to improve its search results along with decreasing the search time.
Free-service model of operation
Google believes that free is better than cheap. It believes that free business models actually come up with additional revenue sources. Free is a viable business model with branding advantages, service and other things. As Goggle`s CEO, Mr. Eric Schmidt puts it, “A rule of economics is that for manufacturing and mature businesses, eventually the price of the good goes to the marginal cost of its production and distribution. Well, in the digital world, for digital goods, the marginal cost of distribution and manufacture is effectively zero or near zero. So, certainly, for that category of goods, it's reasonable to expect that the free model with ancillary branding and revenue opportunities is probably a very good thing.” Recently, Google has released their browser free of cost. On top of that, they are also showing their source code to anyone who wants to look under the hood. They were dissatisfied with the current browsers on the market today and were looking for a way to force them to update and get with the times, i.e., Security, Speed & Usability), so they released their own and set the bar. They are doing all this for free because their aim is to pull more people towards the internet. If the amount of people using the internet increases, then Google wins. The free business model also enables it to kill competition and keep itself ahead in the race.
Constant innovation and launch of new products
Over the years, Google had added a plethora of new products to its name. Starting from Google news service to software packages like Google Earth, it is flooding its users with high utility software and services. Through this strategy, Google targets to increase its loyal customer base and also to have a strong association with its customers. It is making the customers get used to and heavily dependent on its products. Not only does it provide new products, but Google also emphasizes strict monitoring and constant improvement of its products to offer nothing but the best to its customers.
Beta launches of new products
Many a times while visiting one of Google`s sites did we come across the term beta. Many a times we have wondered, ‘What is it?’ A Beta launch is the launch of a product for the purpose of testing. This is one of the unique features of Google and Google uses it to its full
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potential. Whenever Google comes up with a new product, it initially goes for a beta launch of that very product. Beta launches have certain advantages. First of all, it reduces the lead time for Google to launch a product. Secondly, it provides a large testing platform for that product. Users are encouraged to use that product. They provide valuable feedbacks that help Google to improve and tweak the existing product. Beta launches also helps in creating awareness about the product among the masses.
Gradual shift from end-of-network activities to middleof-network
In November 2007, Google entered into mobile phone networking. The cited strategy is to extend Google`s business model to hand held devices. Through this move, Google appears to be promoting a significant shift from information storage, processing and transport primarily managed at the edge of the network into the middle of the network. By providing server-based services that connect to end-user devices, Google can grab business from Microsoft, the Telco, and other Telecom/IT companies. Mobile devices will also act as a key interlink among a wide variety of information Google-managed tools (applications that coordinate among car navigation, desktop computers, home theatres, point-of-sale payment devices, etc.). With Google placed well in the middle of digital information flows, it would have accompanied it`s goal of bringing knowledge to anyone, anywhere and anytime. This will in turn raise advertising revenues for Google.
Complementary advantage to its core business
The sheer breadth of Google`s activities makes it the potential competitors of many businesses including software houses, advertising agencies, telephone companies, newspapers, TV networks, book publishers, movie studios, credit card processors, and Internet firms of all stripes. Even financial advisors, doctors, and librarians eye the company warily. However Google`s business model is quite straightforward. More than 99% of its revenues has come from advertisers who post messages on Google`s website. Google`s products actually serve as complements to its main business model. As more and more products are being launched by Google, more people are getting drawn to its sites. Hence, more advertisers and in turn, more revenues are generated. On top of that, Google gets to collect more data on user activities, trends and tastes. This, in turn, enables Google to modify its existing products according to user preferences and also come up with new products suiting users.
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Aggressive acquisition of sites like Orkut and YouTube
Many of the most and innovative and successful of Google`s new products are the ones that it has acquires rather than created. The products include the hugely popular video-sharing service YouTube, the Weblog publisher Blogger, the virtual globe Google Earth, the online word processor Writely (renamed Google Docs), the wiki developer JotSpot, the news syndication service Feedburner, and the Internet phone service GrandCentral. When it comes to innovation, Google is looking more than an exploiter than an inventor. This is natural and very much required for a fast growing organization.
Low cost base
The rising sale of complementary products has helped Google to hugely reduce its cost. Nearly everything the company does, including building big data centers, buying optical fiber, promoting free Wi-Fi access, fighting copyright restrictions, supporting open source software, and giving away Web services and data, is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. More so, with freely available information, Google incurs almost no cost to assemble the information and cater it to the users. More so, the marginal cost of producing and distributing a purely digital product is close to zero. On top of that, launching of beta-products has enabled Google to bring down the cost of failure to close to zero.
f. Other Differentiating Factors
1.4 Paving a way for clean and green IT:
Google has taken steps to ensure that their operations are environmentally sound. In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide up to 1.6 MW of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs. The system will be the largest solar power system constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world. This initiative has been criticized as an attempt by Google to cover up or make up for the massive amounts of energy their servers actually require. Google has also started a strategic initiative “Re<C” whose mission is to develop electricity from renewable sources cheaper than electricity produced from coal. This project to
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create renewable energy cheaper than coal focuses on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, and enhanced geothermal systems. Through this initiative Google has embraced the challenge of developing a 1 GW of renewable electricity that is cheaper than electricity from coal in years, not decades. Through design improvements and the adoption of power-saving technologies, such as evaporative cooling, Google has made great strides to bolster the efficiency of its data centers. They are also cooperating with members of the tech community to improve efficiency on a broader scale. They have teamed with Intel and other industry partners to form a “Climate Savers Computing Initiative”, a group which advocates the design and adoption of less wasteful computing infrastructure. RechargeIT is an initiative by Google that aims to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use, and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles. They have a demonstration fleet of plug-ins at their headquarters in Mountain View, and they are collecting and posting data on plug-in performance, investing in innovative technologies, and advocating for the passage of important legislation.
1.5 Work Culture:
Google has a highly decentralized work culture. It does not believe in centralization and concentration of too much power in one`s hand. As Google`s core competency lies in innovation and breakthrough in technology, it needs to provide enough flexibility to its employees to experiment and come up with new products. As Craig Silverstein, a 30-year-old engineer who dropped his pursuit of a Stanford PhD to become Google's first employee puts it, “Flexibility is expensive. But we think that flexibility gives you a better product. More important, that's the sort of company I want to work for.” To be a part of Google, one has to dream. Simply putting it, Google operates in much the same way that a science department operates in a big research university. There are a few rules that Google has incorporated and they define its work culture. They are as follows:
The User is in charge
Google emphasizes to satisfy each user every single day. Each of Google`s products are designed and created by keeping the users` convenience in mind. Google aims at increasing
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users` productivity with each new modification. As Google fellow Urz Holzle puts it, “We count bytes. We count them because our users have modems, so it costs them to download our pages.” Google emphasizes that it has only one product. That`s search. People come to Google to search the web and Google makes sure that the users are not distracted from that search. This is the level of commitment and value that Google provides to its users. Google pays attention to the minute details of customer satisfaction and complaints. In fact, it has ten full time employees who does nothing but read emails from users, distributing them to the appropriate colleagues or respond to them themselves. "Nearly everyone has access to user feedback," says Monika Henzinger, Google's director of research. "We all know what the problem areas are, where users are complaining." Google enjoys a unique understanding of its users and a unique loyalty.
The world is your R&D Lab
Google is basically, a house of geeks. It heavily encourages its employees to play with various technologies and come up with a unique product. Recently, Paul Bausch, a 29 year old web developer, helped Google create a blogger, a widely used program that helped people set up their own web log. Following this, Google has encouraged its engineers to fool around with the product at their own will. It had given them the freedom to come up with a better product and also to give them the space to exercise their creativity. "Google knows how to make geeks feel good about being geeks," says Cory Doctorow, prominent geek, blogger, and technology propagandist.
Failures are good. Good failures are better
In Google Labs, just two clicks away from its home page, anyone can test-drive Google Viewer, sort of a motion-picture version of your search results, or Voice Search, a tool that lets one phone in a query and then see your results online. This example cites that Google allows for experimentation, and for failure. Google employees understand that not everything will work. Google has offered them the space to tell it what`s great and what`s not, and what will work better. "Unlike most other companies," observes Matthew Berk, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research, Google has said, 'We're going to try things, and some aren't going to work. That's okay. If it doesn't work, we'll move on.' “In the field of technology, failures are inevitable. Google understands it and believes that failures are the gateway to perfection. Failures are good. But good failures are even better. They have two advantages. People can carry forward the learning from the failures to their next project. And failing early reduces the overall cost.
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Great people can manage themselves
Google lays great importance on recruiting the right people. It spends more time on hiring than on anything else. On an average, Google receives 1,500 resumes a day from wanna-beGooglers. In each of the 300 people that it hired in 2002, Google invested 87 people hours. Google looks for young risk takers. And Google also hires the best brains. It has continuously managed to hire 90% of the best search engine people in the world. As a top Google executive puts it, “The challenge is negotiating the tension between risk and caution”. At first, Google hired managers and also gave management training to its employees. But that put a financial and operational barrier in front of the employees. It send across a message, ‘No you can`t do that’. So, Google got rid of its managers. Now, most engineers work in teams of three, with project leadership rotating among team members. If something goes wrong, including products that have already gone public, the teams fix it on their own, even without asking anyone. "For a while," Rosing says, "I had 160 direct reports. No managers. It worked because the teams knew what they had to do. That set a cultural bit in people's heads: You are the boss. Don't wait to take the hill. Don't wait to be managed." Google gives everyone the space to accommodate failures. If something fails, the employees are encouraged to move on with the next thing. Google has faith in the ability of its smart, well motivated employees to do the proper thing.
If Users come, so will the money
Google does not believe in strategic planning. Innovation at Google is totally left to the ideas of its brilliant employees. CEO Eric Schmidt hasn't decreed which technologies his engineers should dabble in or which products they must deliver. The ideas are judged solely on their popularity and utility. Here`s one example. In December 2001, researcher Krishna Bharat came out with a dynamic news service. Bharat`s news search engine scours for 20 news source every hour and automatically comes up with the most updated news and the hottest gossips in town. This project got a lot of attention in Google and was soon posted on the web after modifying it to include 155 news sources instead of 20. Within three weeks, the news engine was getting a whopping 70,000 users a day. Google puts its innovations on public display to identify failures quickly. It also helps to identify winners. As Sullivan puts it, “At some point, all of this great stuff has to turn a profit.” For the first 18 months of its existence, Google didn't make a penny from its basic Web-search service. After that, users started to pour in. Google believes that if enough users like its product, it will have huge popularity among advertisers. This will in turn
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lead to an inflow of cash. Says Mayer: "Our motto here is there’s no such thing as success-failure on the Net. In other words, if users win, then Google wins. Long live democracy.” Above all, Google teaches us, through both its successes and its failures that smart companies — the ones that are not only consistently innovative but consistently profitable — exhibit three qualities. They hire talented people and give them room to excel. They measure progress and results rigorously and make course adjustments quickly. And they remain disciplined in their work and their spending.
g. Other Google Products
When Google wasn’t satisfied with dominating Internet searches and wanted to tackle the biggest online activity – the email and introduced Gmail, they sensed opportunities in various other areas where they successfully made marks either by developing new products or by acquisitions.
•
Google Email – or Gmail as it is popularly known is the first email service to give Google Talk or GTalk – an instant messaging service tool also providing unlimited file Google Checkout – facilitates secure and easy online credit card purchases for Google Google Calendar – an online calendar that can be used for both personal and shared usage. Google Docs – online file sharing suite for document, presentation or spreadsheet files. Google Maps Google Earth Google Desktop iGoogle Orkut Youtube Picassa Web Albums Google Chrome – web browser
virtually unlimited storage space and features like organizing of mails as conversations. • • • • • • • • • • • • transfers and VOIP client features. users in the US and Canada
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h. Challenges faced by Google:
From a tiny company with a big idea to a corporate giant, Google has seen a super-fast growth and mega-success. Now THAT Google Inc. has reached its 10-year mark, the company is facing the cultural complexities and challenges that come with the transition from hip start-up to corporate giant.
1.
But now key employees of the brain trust have left it to join other companies. Key
Googlers such as former CIO Doug Merrill and Sheryi Sandberg, former vice president of global online sales and operations, have left the company in the past year
2.
Stories of employee dissatisfaction about its corporate culture are beginning to travel
throughout the industry. People who have left the company recently say that they felt disposable and easily replaced. They also say that the long days and hard work
3.
As Google ages, one of its main challenges is to continue to foster technology innovation It is finding it difficult to allow people to be creative
and draw the caliber of talent that start-ups can attract.
4.
1.6 Google’s Response measures:
Google tries to provide autonomy to people by allowing teams working on certain projects the same creative and development freedom they might have if they were still working for a start-up.
i. Competitor’s moves:
With fierce competition existing between Microsoft and Google what new features can Microsoft possibly introduce that will help it overtake Google in search and retain its domination of productivity software such as Office? Microsoft's secret weapon in Windows 7 is not what features the operating system has, but instead what features it doesn’t have. Microsoft is stripping Windows 7 of some of Windows best built-in applications, and it's making them available only as downloads on its Windows Live site. When Windows 7 comes out, it won't include Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker, which are some of Vista's most useful applications, Windows Movie Maker is a surprisingly sophisticated piece of software for creating videos and DVDs, and it's worthy of being sold as stand-alone software. Windows Photo Gallery is a well-done, elegant way to manage digital photos. And Windows Mail is the
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successor to Outlook Express, with a very big installed base. Expect users to howl in protest when they find those applications gone, particularly Windows Mail. To get them, users will have to visit the Microsoft Windows Live site, where the software can be downloaded for free. And, of course, there will be plenty of other Windows Live software they can download, as well as other Windows Live services they can use. It's a variation on the classic "loss leader" in retail, where you lure folks in with freebies and then pounce with a hard sell. Microsoft claims that it is stripping the applications out of Windows 7 because it makes for a "cleaner” operating system.
j. Future Directions
1.7 ANDROID: Mobile Operating System:
The android operating system is an open platform developed by Google® to power mobile devices and handsets. The idea behind the platform is to align technology companies with mobile companies to produce an open operating system that can be updated by any developer to improve the product for its users. Applications created to run on the android operating system are written using the Java programming language and will run on a custom developed virtual machine environment running on top of a Linux kernel. The development of the android operating system takes place through the use of a software development kit (SDK) provided by Google®. Developers can use this kit to create applications that work with the android platform to bring other applications in addition to those included with the android operating system itself.
1.8 Outsourcing:
Google has gone for several acquisitions and has entered into partnerships with several companies to help it in bettering its production and services. In 2004, Google acquired a company called Keyhole, Inc. which developed a product called Earth Viewer which was renamed in 2005 to Google Earth. Also, in 2006, Google bought the online video site YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock and JotSpot, a developer of wiki technology for collaborative Web sites. Google has had a partnership with “NASA Ames Research Center” to build offices and work on research projects involving large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed
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computing, and the entrepreneurial space industry. Google has tied up with Sun Microsystems in October to help share and distribute each other's technologies. The company entered into a partnership with AOL to enhance each other's video search services. Google is also in a partnership with GeoEye for providing Google with high-resolution imagery for Google Earth. Google launched, "Adsense for Mobile", a service focusing on mobile text ads by acquiring a mobile social networking site, Zingku.mobi to provide people with information on the move. Google has kept outsourcing as the last option at several occasions. But now, it is also trying to leverage on the power of outsourcing. Google is considering outsourcing some of its IT infrastructure to Sun Microsystems which is specialized in lowering the electric power consumption in the huge data centers. Google is also planning to outsource its "critical financial functions" which include billing, credit evaluation and collections. Google does not have the experience or person-power to track the millions of agreements it has made while it continues to base its bottom line on revenues generated through these agreements.
k. Conclusion:
In today’s business climate, no organization can afford wasted time, lost value, and missed opportunities. Connecting people to the relevant information they need – quickly, easily, and accurately – empowers Google’s users and offers their organization significant bottom-line benefits. And that is what Google is exactly doing. While Google's success has prompted its competitors to follow suit, its trail of high-margin profits and surging revenue may not continue at its current pace, the company and analysts warned. Whether their business model will help them sustain in the days to come; only time will tell.
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l. References:
1.9 Journal Articles:
1. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – submitted by Sergey
Brin and Lawrence Page, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
2. Android Calling – MIT Technology Review, April 2008
1.10 Magazine Articles:
1. Can Anything Derail Google's Growth Engine? - Rayport, Jeffrey F., Business Week
Online, September 28, 2008
2. Microsoft’s Secret weapon against Google – Preston Gralla, Computerworld, October 27,
2008
1.11 News Articles:
1. Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine – Saul Hansel, NewYorkTimes, June 3, 2007 2. Search Me! – David Carr, BusinessLine, December 1, 2008 3. Where does Google go now – John Naughton, Management Today
1.12 Books:
1. The Google Story – David A. Vise, PAN Books
1.13 Websites:
1. Simplicity and Enterprise Search - http://www.google.com 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google 3. https://www.howstuffworks.com 4. http://www.google.org/recharge/ 5. http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/ 6. https://www.wisegeek.com
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