Strategic Analysis of Google

Description
The objective of this presentation is about analyzes competitive strengths of Google and its business model.

Competitive forces
? Substitute Products
? New Entrants ? Existing Competitors ? Customers ? Suppliers

Bargaining power of buyers
? 97 % of Google's revenues derived from advertising

(2008) ? No single account contributes more than 3% to net revenue
? No controlling interest of any buyer

? In Google’s system many advertisers bid on keywords ? Sell of popular keywords for much higher value per click through than not well-known topics ? Distributed approach allowing Google to attract various kinds of companies, keeping buyers’ power low

Bargaining power of suppliers
? Google’s suppliers rely on Google’s ad system for a

reliable source of income ? Market dominance of Google with its search product ? Low suppliers’ bargaining power ? Low switching costs ? Cost of revenues as a percentage of sales in 2008: Google = 38 %, Yahoo = 42 % ? Efficient supplier-seller collaboration

Threat of Substitute Products and Services
? Increase in the number of Internet users worldwide from

about 360 million in 2000 to nearly 1.5 billion in 2008
? No suitable substitute for search ? Big search engine like Google provides a large variety of tools

in order to organize information and conduct searches

? Internet advertising: 2nd most common form of

advertising used in the USA in 2007 ? Strong prospects in 2009 for Internet advertisers: increase from $21 billion in 2007 to $36.5 billion in 2011 ? Search-based ads: largest portion of Internet advertisements in the USA in 2008

Threat of New Entrants
? High barriers to entry in the Internet search market
? Very efficient high technology and significant know-how of

the current competitors
? Steady accumulation of data regarding users’ habits

? Need for new entrant to provide better and quicker search

results to compete in this highly competitive market

? Necessity to gather data on both the content of Web pages

and the search history of users ? Well-established search market
? Threat of new entrants in the search engine market: relatively

low. Only big players can enter.

Rivalry among Existing Competitors
? High exit barriers, especially for Google and Yahoo!
? Relative new business with good growth opportunities ? Competition in rather non-price dimensions:

marketing, brand, technology ? Low diversity of competitors with similar services and products ? Significant opportunities for economies of scale in the search advertising business

Porter’s Five Competitive Forces Model
? Strongest competitive force: competitive rivalry
? Weakest competitive force: bargaining power of buyers ? Dynamism of markets driven by innovation ? High overall industry attractiveness

Google’s Infrastructure

Google maintains over 450,000 servers

Google has numerous data centers scattered around the world

Most of the software stack that Google uses on their servers was developed inhouse

Information Repository
? Google has indexed a trillion web pages vastly

more than any competitor; ? Google uniquely is copying all books, photographing every street view, etc ? Google can track ~90% of all Internet users, dramatically more than competitors ? Google dominates in video streaming, blogging, news aggregation, Earth, etc ? Google has interfaces in ~118 languages, several dozen more than competitors ? Google is far ahead competitively integrating search, TV, audio, classified, etc

Google as a Bundled service
Google is downloaded with every upgrade of Adobe’s 98% dominant software;
Google search is downloaded with every Mozilla (and Chrome) browser adoption;

Google search is downloaded with every Real Networks upgrade

Google’s scale efficiencies
Google has ~70% U.S. search market share, ~90% share in Europe.
Google’s audience is ~4x larger than Yahoo’s, ~7x times larger than Microsoft’s Google has ~1,000,000 advertisers, Yahoo ~300,000, Microsoft ~75,000;

High intellect Employees

Network Effect
? Network effect describes how a service becomes more

valuable to its users as more users use that same service.

Network circulation Value creation model
? Global value of company relies on the traffic between

network parts (proprietery or partner)

Value to Customer
• Cheap and affordable

Network effect Eg. OpenSocial

Indirect Network Effect for advertisers

And…
• Relevancy • Tracking (CPC) • Innovative and user friendly applications(maps,docs,transl iteration,picasa,youtube etc etc…..) • Simple user interface • Global but local • Faster and efficient searches

Challenges
AdWords under fire for a practice called ‘clickfraud’ and Google’s vague response to the problem
Yahoo sponsoring academic economists and researchers to find new ways to use its data about online consumer behaviour to increase market share. Microsoft MSN and its integration in the Microsoft Operating Systems and new versions of Office

Challenges
Context-aware searches --- Context aware devices may try to make assumptions about the user's current situation. Context is "any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity.”

Deep-Web searches – Microsoft has the capital to purchase copyrighted material and owns powerful digital rights management software. Data that is not indexed by search engines.

Factors causing challenges
? Fatal flaw in the cost-per-click model
? Secret Policy theory causes doubt among people ? Not working on backlog unlike Yahoo ? Comparably new to Yahoo ? Dependent on Windows or other OS ? Only web based products ? Need of capital to strategize pricing

Factors causing challenges
? Working simultaneously on many projects – Not able

to take care of all of them – Not innovating on existing product.

Adwords Click Fraud
? Campaign Performance or Account Performance report

?Looking at duplicate IP addresses, user session information, network information, geo-targeting and browser information

Tackling
? The User Is in Charge ? The World Is Google’s R&D Lab

Tackling
? Google’s Web-based computing model ? Google Spreadsheets ? Google Apps ? Revenue Model

Advantage Search
? Acquisition of traffic from hardware manufacturers

? Google Toolbar ? Google Desktop Search ? Google’s Deep-Web Crawl

submitting queries to HTML forms and adding the results it finds to its index

Google’s Outlook
? Google's lack of legacy frees it to innovate rapidly and

broadly. ? Microsoft is a victim of its own success, needing to cater to its existing clientele with each new release, in true "Innovator's Dilemma" fashion.

Changing Face Of The PC
? The desktop is simply the means by which a user loads

a browser. It's a gateway. ? The value is not in the desktop anymore. It's in the browser, which is the new desktop, in terms of real functionality delivered.

Cloud Computing
? Google provides an increasingly wide array of cloud-

based services to enterprises looking to untether themselves from the desktop. ? Windows 7 should have been Microsoft's launchpad to cloud computing, but isn't.

Smartphone
? Google's Android momentum is almost astounding,

with AdMob data pegging Android smartphone penetration in the U.K. at 10 percent ? If we assume that mobile will increasingly be the client platform of choice, then we see Google squeezing Microsoft



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