SWOT ANALYSIS OF GOOGLE

GOOGLES BUSINESS STRATEGY: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE STRENGTHS; WEAKNESSES; OPPORTUNITIES; AND THREATS (SWOT) OF GOOGLE

BY: KWAKU F. DARKWAH (MBA; B.ED; CTLLS; ASSOCIATE-CIPD; MInstLM) CEO/FOUNDER: ADESUA GLOBAL, GHANA LECTURER-MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT, LONDON SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION (LSME) FEBRUARY, 2010

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1:1 INTRODUCTION Arguably, in the last 10 years since the expansion of information technology as a result of the internet; one astounding firm that has impacted on our lives is Google. All age groups; different ethnic backgrounds; different religious backgrounds; different political backgrounds and affiliations all have been influenced by the impact of this organisation. Debatably, Google is one of the most powerful search engines in the world. Arguably, it can be said that Google is the

most visited website in the world. It is now worth in excess of $94billion, although its value has more than halved since December 2007 (Time, 2008). Google attracts about 61.9 per cent of all internet searches online. According to Clark (2007) Google accounts for 56% of all searches on the internet according to the online research firm Comscore. In UK, Google is visited more than any other website or online site with 28.6m unique users in September, 2007 - reaching 89% of all UK internet users. This article is aimed at analysing the business strategy of Google in terms of its historical perspectives; business concept; SWOT analysis; competitors analysis and critical success factors.

1:2 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE AND ORIGINS Historically, according to Times online (2008) Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998, backed by $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, the Sun Microsystems co-founder. These two friends met in Stanford University where they were both doing a PhD course in 1996. The name Google originated from the word googol which referred to the number 1 followed by about a hundred zeros. The search engine initially used the Stanford website to host their domain name google. stanford. edu. In September 15th, 1997, the domain name google.com was officially registered and in the following year, precisely September 4th, 2008, the two friends officially registered their company as Google Incorporated and used their friends garage in Menlo Park, California as their office.

Googles simplicity in terms of the design of their website attracted a lot of internet users. The two friends, Page and Brin started the search engine firm with an initial $100,000 they got from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems in August, 1998. Google has grown over the years to become the most searched engine in the world, outperforming firms like Yahoo; MSN; AOL; and CNN. In 2004, it was reported that google handled more than 85% search requests on the World Wide Web. Google is now one of the most visited search engine in the world. The total employees of Google as at September, 2009 were almost 20,000 people.

2:1 PRODUCTS OF GOOGLE The list of products offered by Google are numerous and diversified. It includes Earth; Chrome; Picasa; Visigami; SketchUp; Talk; Gmail; Google News; Google Mobilizer; iGoogle; Google Reader; Google Latitude; Google Maps; Google Talk; Google Sync; Ad Sense; iGoogle; Orkut; Knol; Google Mini; Google Trends; Google health; Google Mobilizer; Google Double click; Google FeedBurner; Google Gadgets; and Google Profiles. All the products of Google are very

useful and have made a lot of impact in the way we communicate; access information and locate things easily.

2:2 GOOGLES FINANCIAL STATUS TO DATE A research on Googles official website revealed that as at end of year 2008, the revenue of Google have increased by 31.3% to $21.796 billion; the operating income have also increased by 30.4% to $6.632 billion; net income appreciated by .6% to $4.227 billion. Total assets of the organisation were up and valued at $31.768 billion; total equity was also valued at $28.239 billion. Since 2001, Google have made strategic acquisitions to consolidate its position as the most popular and visited website. Google acquired a firm called Key Hole Inc. in 2004 and renamed it as Google Earth. It has also acquired You Tube; Double Click; and Grand Central among others to strategically sustain its business concept. It has also entered into partnership with NASA Research Centre to work on research projects that involves a large-scale data management to help improve space technology.

3:1 INSIGHTS INTO GOOGLES PEOPLE AND CULTURE Google Inc. was started with only 2 classmates who later formed one of the most powerful search engine companies in the world. At present, the company employs almost 20,000 people worldwide. The three key people in the company are the two founders Lawrence E. Page and Sergey M. Brin; the former also plays the role of Technology President; whilst the latter also plays the role of Products President. The Chairman and CEO is Eric E. Schmidt. Google maintains an organisational culture that makes it very attractive; conducive; convenient; and lovely place to work. It has a homely and serene atmosphere where all kinds of people from different ethnic backgrounds can work. There is a sense of we-togetherness amongst the staff. They feel part of a team focusing on achieving the goals of Google. Google embraces multicultural employment opportunities and most of the people working in the firm come from diverse backgrounds. All the people who work at Google believe that all their efforts will add value to the company and as such they are dedicated to their work. They are very committed to the cause of Google and want the firm to be at the top of the competition at all times. The people working in Google are encouraged to be innovative and as a motivation for the staff at Google, the engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on any interesting project they think will add value to the firm. This innovative and motivational policy has enabled the engineers to create interesting services like Ad Sense; Google News; and Google Mail. Googles office in California which they have labelled as Googolplex is very much designed to make the people who work in Google feel at home away from home. The atmosphere and environment is very much conducive and convenient for all the staff because all the facilities they need is available for them.

3:2 BUSINESS MODEL OF GOOGLE Google Inc. has a unique business model that sets it apart from its major competitors. According to Chaffey (2007) Googles business model is encapsulated in the SEC filing statement, to organize the worlds information and makes it universally accessible and useful. Googles major task is to make information easily accessible to its major stakeholders namely the people who seek for information on the internet. In support, Chaffey (2007) insists that Googles model is highly geared to offer the best and quality service to the users so that their experience will lead to a strong word of mouth promotion and strong traffic growth. In this regard, Google have acquired or form alliances with You Tube; e-bay; Yahoo (now abrogated); and Amazon. Google aims to collaborate or merge with the top online firms and through these innovative collaborations and mergers enable them to stay on top of its major competitors. According to Dwivedi (2008) Google have move further from its initial core business model into different business concepts by expanding into different marketing offerings to its numerous clients such as Picasa; Blogger; Keyhole; Gmail; and Google News etc. Dwivedi (2008) claims that Google is primarily advertising firm, because 90% of its revenue and income comes from online advertisement for various other websites. Google allows any new business to start advertising online without any need to hire the services of professional graphic designers; or advertisement consultants. Google is very keen on providing any services online that will enable the users and patrons to be efficient and save a lot of time in their quest for knowledge and information. Google aims to redefine the process of e-commerce and e-business so that it will be more attractive to its users. In a nutshell, Googles business model is to advertise and provide services to all online users. Google has become the most identified and recognized brands outperforming Coca Cola and McDonalds because of its vastly search engine. Any online market or firm that attracts a lot of users is a business target for Google. That is why Google have either acquired or have some strategic alliance with firms like You Tube; Amazon; and My Space. 4: 1 INTRODUCTION OF SWOT ANALYIS SWOT analysis is a management tool that is used by most corporate organisations in making decisive strategic decisions that helps the organisation to be stable and sustainable in the long term. Bono and Heller (2005) and Stettinus et al (2007) suggest that one of management's trustiest tools is the SWOT analysis. SWOT is an acronym for Strengths; Weaknesses; Opportunities; and Threats. The Strength and Weaknesses are within the organization; whilst the Opportunities and Threats are beyond the organization in the wider external environment. Bono and Heller (2005) claims that the SWOT is to capitalize on the Strengths, Eliminate the Weaknesses, seize the best Opportunities and counter the Threats. In terms of the application of the SWOT analysis, most business organizations including Google can have some vital strengths; weaknesses which are internal, whilst they are also benefiting from the opportunities and affected by the threats in the external environment. The strengths of various business

organizations include a high global presence; cost reduction through economic of scale; strong and famous brand names; easily location on the internet. The following information below details the strengths and weaknesses of Google.

4:2 GOOGLES MARKETS Google is an entrepreneurial and an innovative corporate organisation that has one of the unique marketing strategies which is unparalleled in the history of online technology. Google apart from being the leading internet search engine in the world, also continuously and consistently strive to bring to the market various innovative products. Google has a marketing strategy that focuses on the youth of the world who want to seek information; have fun; gain knowledge; and be well acquainted with all that evolves around the environment they live. Google has a diverse customer base ranging from young people to the older people. Google targets all the people who use the internet. Anyone who uses the internet search engine is a potential market for Google because by using Google search engine you are making money indirectly for Google. Google has in its portfolio thousands of corporate organisations; millions of Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) who all uses the internet search engine to search, share and visualise their business information for expansion and promotional purposes. According to Opendb.net (2006) Google has indexed more than 8 billion web pages on the web and is the most popular search engine on the web today. It has become a norm and standard procedure that anyone with an Internet connection can use the website to look for information that s/he needs. Any online organisation that attracts a sizable number of visitors is a market target for Google. Their business strategy is to be ahead of the major competitors and will leave no stone unturned in its quest to be the leading internet search engine in the world. Google in recent times have been tactically making in roads into markets previously not part of their business model. Reuters (2009) reported that Google have entered the navigation market and have become a direct threat to Garmin Ltd and TomTom. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt claimed that expanding into a new market with new competitors was not part of Googles motivation (Reuters, 2009) but strictly speaking the company is just positioning itself to the public, especially cell phone users who are now very much accustomed to having maps in 3 Dimension on their cell phones. In summarising the market of Google, it can be deduced that majority of internet users are in one way or another impacted upon by Google and as such the market for Google can be equated to the number of online or internet users.

4:3 KEY TECHNOLOGIES OF GOOGLE

Google uses a perfect search engine that to a large extent understands exactly what you mean and gives you exactly what you want (Reuters, 2009). Google uses a software technology that is able to conduct a series of simultaneous calculations within a fraction of a second and in comparison with other traditional search engines that relies on how often a word appears on a web page. Google uses more than 200 signals in addition to their patented PageRank algorithm which enables the examination of an entire link structure of the web to determine which pages are most important. In addition, Google (2009) uses Page Rank Technology and Hypertext-Matching Analysis. The Page Rank Technology uses more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms to enable the profiling of important pages to receive a higher page rank and appear at the top of search results. The Hypertext-Matching Analysis is a search engine of Google which analyzes the full content of a text page and all the various technicalities such as the fonts and content of neighbouring web pages to enable the results to suit the information request wanted by the user. 4:4 QUALITY OF PERSONNEL Google has an astounding profile of men and women with high academic achievements and experience in various endeavours in information technology and knowledge management. Most of their top corporate executives have at least an MBA and PhD in various disciplines which are very relevant to the vision of Google. A detailed reading of their profile will reveal that they are members and fellows of reputable associations and councils. For instance, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google is a member of President Obamas Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He was also inducted to the America Academy of Arts and Sciences as a fellow in 2007 (Google, 2009). Below is just a few of Googles staff and their designated titles: 4:5 Board of Directors

Eric Schmidt, Google Inc. Sergey Brin, Google Inc. Larry Page, Google Inc. John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Ram Shriram, Sherpalo John Hennessy, Stanford University Paul Otellini, Intel Shirley M. Tilghman, Princeton University Ann Mather

4:6 Operating Committee

Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer Larry Page, Co-Founder & President, Products Sergey Brin, Co-Founder & President, Technology Nikesh Arora, President, Global Sales Operations and Business Development Laszlo Bock, Vice President, People Operations Shona L. Brown, Senior Vice President, Business Operations, Google Inc. W. M. Coughran, Jr., Senior Vice President, Engineering

David C. Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering & Research Urs Hlzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow Jeff Huber, Senior Vice President, Engineering Omid Kordestani, Senior Advisor, Office of the CEO and Founders Patrick Pichette, Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management Rachel Whetstone, Vice President, Public Policy and Communications Susan Wojcicki, Vice President, Product Management

SOURCE: (http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html).

Another factor that is key to the quality of the personnel/staff that work in Google is that Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, which beats all the other large tech companies we looked at, including big hitters like Microsoft, Apple, Intel and IBM (Pingdom, 2009). The data below illustrates the profit per employee in 2008 in US Dollars. This phenomenon is an incentive for any employee of Google to work very hard because the figures are very motivating enough for gingered performance. Google has been able to outperform the likes of Microsoft; Apple; and Yahoo who are lagging far way behind. Googles staffs are intrinsically motivated to give of their best and they are very much dedicated in the execution of their various assigned duties and responsibilities. Pingdom (2008) suggest that it is intriguing to imagine that the larger a company gets, the more difficult it becomes to minimize overhead and costs. For instance, HP and IBM, by far the largest companies listed here in terms of sheer size, have a relatively low profit margin per employee. In that sense Microsoft is doing a very good job considering that they are close to matching Google in spite of having 4.5 times as many employees. And of course, looking at overall profit for the company, Microsoft is way ahead of every other company on this list. Below is a detailed data of how the figure (graph) above was derived. For those interested, here is a table with some more data, including the actual number of employees and the revenue per employee. The list is sorted by profit per employee: Revenue and profit per employee in 2008 (in USD) Company Employees Revenue per employee Profit per employee 1,080,914 209,624 Google 20,164 663,956 194,297 Microsoft 91,000 6,397 499,961 163,844 Baidu 32,000 1,014,969 151,063 Apple 66,129 597,922 121,762 Cisco 7,335 488,056 118,856 Adobe 16,200 527,238 109,844 eBay

Intel Oracle Dell Amazon Yahoo IBM HP Sun

82,500 86,657 76,500 20,600 13,600 398,455 321,000 33,556

455,588 258,837 798,706 930,388 530,037 260,080 368,735 413,637

64,145 63,711 32,392 31,311 31,199 30,957 25,947 12,010

SOURCE: (http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/14/congratulations-google-staff-210k-in-profitper-head-in-2008/)

4:6 CAPITAL BASE AND REVENUE STREAMS Clark (2007) claims that 10 years after the establishment of Google in a Stanford University hostel, the firm founded by two friends Sergey Brin and Larry Page has a record capitalization of 105 billion overtaking Procter and Gamble and placing 5th on the US stock market. According to Clark (2007) only energy giants Exxon Mobil; General Electric; Microsoft and the telecoms company AT&T are leading Google in terms of market capitalization. Business Week (2006) asserted that Googles innovation in search technology didnt make money until it started auctioning advertisements that appear alongside the search results by users. Advertising today accounts for 99% of the revenue of a company whose market capitalization now tops $100 billion (Business Week, 2006). In a similar development, a research by Anil Kamath, a technology officer of Efficient Frontier Inc. estimates that Google earns about 30% more revenue per advertisement impression than Yahoo does (Business Week, 2006). This has made Google have a comparative advantage over Yahoo and its other major competitors. Also, Wakabayashi (2007) alleges that financial records shows that Google derives almost all of its $10.6 billion in annual revenue for 2006 from advertising, while Microsoft's loss-making Internet arm generated $2.3 billion in sales in 2006. Microsoft makes most of its money from its dominant Windows operating system and Office software suite. 5:1 WEAKNESSES OF GOOGLE Google gets at least 1,400 CVs/Resumes everyday and doing a simple calculation it means that every year they have about approximately over half a million applicants seeking to work in this prestigious organisation (Shiels, 2004). This is a headache of the top corporate executives because it is very difficult to shortlist and chooses the best candidates/applicants for various positions on offer. More so, loyalty and dedication of their staff is another predicament for Google. In May, 2008, Elliot Schrage, one of the senior executive at Google, left the organisation to join the social network Facebook (Shiels, BBC News, 2008). Elliot was head of global communications and public affairs; his departure was a series of top executives exodus from Google to Facebook

such as Sheryl Sandberg; Ben Ling; Ethan Beard; and Gideon Yu. This movement of top staff shows a significant failure of the very top executives to have a proper mechanism and strategy to sort out their differences with other aggrieved senior staff. The fear is that these staff may reveal trade secrets of Google to arch rivals in the information technology business and this is an issue Google must contend with. According to Times Online (2008) Google failed to give the usual $1000 present for Christmas but instead gave to all its employees a version of the G1 mobile phone that was released in the same year (2008). This was a motivational let-down of the employees because they were expecting the cash. Quinn (2009) pointed out that Google has developed an algorithm that helps the management to pinpoint and speak to those who may be on the verge of departing to be assigned new roles before they decide to leave. This development is ample evidence to prove that the management of Google are not on top of their game, therefore some of their staff feel under utilised, a situation that has compelled a sizable number of them to leave to different firms. Google Inc. has suffered from some high-profile exits to rivals including Twitter and AOL in recent months, departures which may prove to be costly in terms of both time and money (Quinn, 2009). This weakness of Google is that there seems to be problems with the top management in terms of its inability to hire or retain key people. Also, Google hires a lot of contractors and some of them virtually does nothing expect to waste the resources of the company. Farrell (2009) wrote that last year Google said it was giving a large number of its 10,000 contractors their marching orders to keep all the permanent staff in jobs in place as a result of a restructuring exercise. Co-founder Sergey Brin was of the view that the 10,000 contractors were too much and it was better to downsize the number. Thus, this was another proof to show that planning of staff recruitment; job description; and job evaluation was not properly and efficiently handled by Googles management. An interesting comment by Scott (2006) concerns the fact that Google allows a lot of pornography sites to be included on their search engine database which in his opinion was a weakness. Scott (2006) again emphasized that Googles huge weakness is their blind willingness and eagerness to include as many pages in the index as possible because in actual fact only 2% of indexed pages need to be indexed, the other 98% are crap and unnecessary. The CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, hired in 2001 figured out how to monetize Google by selling unobtrusive advertisements on related links (Economist, 2004). However, there seems to be no barriers to entry for competitors and that the market for search engine firms is becoming increasingly competitive with firms like MSN; Mooter, and Yahoo all joining the search engine market. 6:1 OPPORTUNITIES AND COMPETITIVE ANALYIS There are many opportunities in the external environment for Google to exploit and become more versatile in the market industry they operate. The ability to grasp and implement the opportunities will place it in a very stable position far ahead of their major competitors like Yahoo; Microsoft and Amazon. In addition, Wakabayashi (2007) stated that Microsoft believes new Web services will work in tandem with software installed on the computer, a vision that

differs from "software as a service" advocates who expect services delivered over the Web to eventually replace software that resides on local PCs. This is indeed a great opportunity for Google to expand and assert itself on the market because their new operating system to be launched in the second half of 2010 is an upgrade of the Google Chrome.

According to the Liedtke (2009) If enough computer manufacturers embrace the Chrome operating system, it could weaken Microsoft while opening up new avenues for Google to persuade consumers and businesses to use its suite of online applications and other Internet services, generating more opportunities for Google to sell lucrative Internet ads. This will greatly be a great incentive for Google and a disincentive for Microsoft because their operating system tagged Windows is quite expensive due to the fact that it adds an extra cost to the purchase of a PC. If Googles operating system is successfully launched, it will be a fierce challenge to Microsoft who has enjoyed some kind of monopoly for more than two decades without any formidable challenge by any firm. Similarly, Womack (2009) has said that There is a possibility that the new OS can break the paradigm Microsoft and Intel created over the past 20 years, This is indeed an ample indication that there is plenty of business opportunity for Google in the information technology market. Nevertheless, getting consumers and businesses to switch to computers powered by a new operating system won't be easy, as Google has learned from the introduction of Chrome (Liedtke, 2009). Google have been gradually trying its operating system for Smart Phones and other mobile devices. This operating system is referred to as Android and is a direct challenge to the ones by Microsoft Inc. and Apples Inc. According to the Associated Press (2009) Google says about 30 million people are using Chrome, a small fraction of the Web surfers who rely on Microsoft's market-leading Internet Explorer. If all their marketing and operation strategies fall in place, then Google will ultimately capture the market with its proposed operating system next year. At the moment the worlds third largest PC manufacturer, Acer Inc. have dropped Windows notebooks and replaced it with Android which in their opinion is cost saving and at the same time will enable the PCs to run faster (Liedtke, 2009). At the moment, Microsoft is not lying low with the perceived threat from arch competitors Google; they have recently launched their new operating system called Windows 7 to replace the Windows Vista which many analysts described as a failure because of many defects and technical problems. Also, Associated Press (2009) claim that Microsoft has been trying to thwart Google by investing billions of dollars to improve its own Internet search and advertising systems. This fierce challenge and competition between Google and Microsoft is indeed good news to consumers because it will in the long term bring the prices of operating systems to an agreeable level. Shiels (2009) suggest that Googles Operating system to be tagged Chrome OS will be a direct challenge to the market leader in operating system, Microsoft and its Window system. The announcement by Google to launch its own version of the operating system could dramatically

change the market for operating systems, especially for Microsoft, the biggest player with around 90% share (Shiels, 2009). In a similar development, Reuters (2009) claimed that as part of its quest to attract users to its Gmail service, Google has introduced dozens of features, including one that, after a certain time, makes a user solve a Maths problem before sending an email, giving them time to rethink it. Google makes money anytime an e-mail user clicks an advertisement banner in their inbox; by enhancing their e-mail service to increase their advertising market share, they hope to take away a significant chunk of the market share away from Yahoo. 6:2 THREATS AND REACTIONS OF YAHOO, MICROSOFT AND AMAZON Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon have all joined in a court suit to block the court settlement of a 2005 copyright infringement class-action suit that would give Google the right to digitize, host, and sell ads against millions of published works (Myslewski, 2009). This is just a tiny bit of the threats faced by Google against their major competitors. Google agreed to pay $125 million to settle the copyright lawsuit. Microsoft filed a suit against Google in 2007 to stop the latter from Double click merging. Yahoo also filed a suit in November, 2008 against Google for the latter to abandon the attempts to overcome the objections of antitrust regulators. In February, 2009, Sourcetool a B2B search engine filed an antitrust suit against Google accusing it of upping it ads rates unfairly. Analysts in the information technology industry allege that some of these suits are the works of Googles arch competitors like Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon. Gather (2004) claim that In January 2008, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion, but Yahoo demanded more money. At the present, instead of buying Yahoo, Microsoft decided to partner with the search engine in order to take on Google. Notwithstanding this agreement, Google will remain the dominant force with a share of about 65% in the search ad market. Other threats faced by Google are their inability to motivate their contract employees spread all over the world. In December 2008, Google could not give cash bonus to their contract staff members but gave them G1 cell phones. According to Times Online (2008) the customized G1 devices will be given to all permanent Google employees in the United States, Western and Central Europe, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Japan, covering about 85 per cent of its 20,123 global staff. The loss of the cash bonus is not the first blow for Google staff. The number of restaurants on its campus open in the evening has already been cut. Moreover, the credit crunch has generally slowed down the demand for gadgets. According to Times Online (2008) Google's fellow residents of Silicon Valley have been badly hit by the credit crunch. With consumer spending down, so, too, are sales of gadgets. And, with the cost of credit so high, companies are cutting back as far as they can on IT spending. Times Online (2008) estimated that 140,000 jobs have been cut this year, according to Challenger, Grey & Christmas, the recruitment consultancy, with the axe falling at groups such as Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo! and Sun Microsystems. In spite of all this gloom economic turbulence, Google is a long way from being in trouble: it enjoyed turnover in excess of $21 billion (13.6 billion) during 2008. However, quarter-onquarter revenue growth, which hit 14 per cent last year, was only 3 per cent in the three months to September 30, reflecting the slowing growth rate of internet advertising (Times Online, 2008).

7:1 REFLECTIONS ON GOOGLES MISSION STATEMENT Googles mission statement is To make the worlds information universally accessible and useful. The company established more than a decade ago to a greater extent seems to have achieved their mission statement in a variety of ways. First, it has been able to dominate the internet as a search engine with more than 60% market share in 2008, outperforming Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask. Googles business strategy is not insane but in my opinion very smart indeed. They aim to make access to any online and computer technology very accessible and free so that through this kind gesture a lot of people will be attracted to their site. The money they make will be the ads placed on their site because of their tremendous popularity. With increasing competition in the business of information technology, the best way to actually capture the hearts and minds of the consumers is to offer them all the useful softwares they need to keep them loyal and that is what Google have strategically being doing. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft to choose the alma mater of the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin to make that sweeping statement that their strategy was insane was in my opinion very ridiculous. Debatably, Google is currently enjoying a good turnover in excess of $21 billion (13.6 billion) during 2008. However, quarter-on-quarter revenue growth, which hit 14 per cent last year, was only 3 per cent in the three months to September 30, reflecting the slowing growth rate of internet advertising (Times Online, 2008). If this is so, then it means the statement by Steve Ballmer is just a hollow talk with no substance. Googles ability to offer services which Microsoft charges quite a substantial amount of money is indeed a reflection of how they have been able to position their organisation to the needs of the masses. The launching of the Google Operating System next year will be a direct and fierce challenge to the might of Microsoft in the control of the operating system market. Googles ability to provide a huge suite of internet services such as Google Maps; Google Earth; Google Videos; Google Images; Google Calendar; Google Groups; and Google Books have made them to be the leading corporate firm in the information technology ahead of the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft.

7:2 APPRAISAL OF THE COMPANIES ACQUIRED BY GOOGLE Google has made a couple of acquisitions in the more than ten years of their existence. Since making their first acquisition of Deja Usenet in 2001 for strategic purpose of getting data of about 500 million discussions of group postings, Google have gone to acquire a lot of other companies. In 2006, Google made a high profile purchase of the You Tube website for $1.65 billion, this was a strategic purchase because You Tube was not actually making any profit, nevertheless the site was visited by more than 100 million users and on average they watched about 55 videos (Reuters, 2009). The acquisition of You Tube was to have access to the 100 million users and strategically position Google. Google have also acquired companies such as

dMarc. In January 2006; followed by Upstartle a company which helped to spearhead what is now referred to as Google Docs & Spreadsheets. By end of 2007, Google had acquired four more companies namely Gapminder's Trendalyzer software, Adscape Media, Picasa; Endoxon; Dodgeball; PeakStream Technologies and DoubleClick - potentially their most lucrative acquisition to date (Meettheboss, 2009). Chan (2007) suggest that Google executives mingle with other industry leaders and insiders. This helps to keep them well-informed of their competition as well as potential purchases. This therefore shows that there is no basis for the Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer to suggest that Googles business strategy is insane. If not for anything, it is innovative and has been able to win a lot of human traffic to their site. Meettheboss (2009) asserted that In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger. This acquisition by Google secured the company's competitive capability and ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and significance of articles contained in a companion product to the search engine. It was a strategic acquisition which helped Google to improve tremendously on their search engine capabilities and prowess. Chan (2007) claims that Google to determine the value of a company and whether it is a potential, acquisition candidate. To estimate the value of a company Google can determine several factors, among others, from their data: v size of the audience v growth rate of the company v current and potential competitors v potential investors v related technologies v Market potential. It must be emphasised that from the above, that Googles business strategy is not insane but rather they utilize an enhanced technological strategy to undertake a massive data mining resource to ascertain the viability and competitive advantage they may be derive from a targeted company before making any investment decision. 7:3 GOOGLES BUILDING OF A SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE THROUGH INNOVATIVE PROJECTS Googles main agenda is that by undertaking innovative projects they are indirectly advancing their strategic intent. Googles acquisition of companies is just to add more value in terms of quality staff, more users, and more profits. Lenssen (2009) suggest that the end goal of acquiring a company may be aligned with Googles overall mission. Lenssen (2009) claimed that there is a link of their mission statement and business strategy. He summarises as

grab all the worlds data,

make that data useful and accessible in order to direct user attention towards it,

profit from ads displayed with the data.

Google by undertaking projects with other IT firms is tactically grabbing all the worlds data and having it in their database for more accessibility. They in turn make their profits by displaying the data with customised advertisements. The more users click on the adverts: the more Google are making profits. Lenssen (2009) contends that some companies sole reason of existence seems to be doing all they can to be acquired by Google. He referred to these companies as trying to create Googlebait wanting to be snapped up by Google.

7:4 GOOGLES RECRUITMENT STRATEGIES AND COMPANY CULTURE Google maintains a recruitment strategy that makes it very attractive; conducive; convenient; and lovely place to work. According to Hobson (2008) Liane Hornsey of Google's human resources department told the website that the company is 'built on trust.' Google endeavours to find the right calibre of people who can fit into the companys culture. According to Hornsey, 'We try very hard to find the right people, people who will fit in with the Google culture, because we believe that if you can hire the right people, then everything else just flows from that,' Getting the right people is very paramount to the success of any viable organisation including Google. Google spend huge sums of money in getting the right calibre of people who can fit into their organisational culture. Google gets at least 1,400 CVs/Resumes everyday and doing a simple calculation it means that every year they have about approximately over half a million applicants seeking to work in this prestigious organisation (Shiels, 2004). Out of this 1,400 CVs and Resumes Googles HR have to go through a lot of processes to choose the best people for the vacant positions in the organisation. They need to ensure that those they select are loyal and dedicated to the vision and ideals of the organisation because of the fear that these staff may reveal trade secrets of Google to arch rivals in the information technology business and this is an issue Google must contend with. The cultural atmosphere at Google is very homely and serene where all kinds of people from different ethnic backgrounds can work. They feel part of a team focusing on achieving the goals of Google. Google embraces multi-cultural employment opportunities and most of the people working in the firm come from diverse ethnic backgrounds. All the staffs totalling more than 20,000 working at Google believes that their efforts will add value to Google and they are very focused and dedicated to their work. The people working in Google are encouraged to be

pioneering; innovative and be ingenious. Google have a policy that encourages their engineers and other technicians to spend 20% of their work time on any interesting project they think will add value to the firm. This innovative and creative policy has enabled the engineers/technicians to create interesting services like Ad Sense; Google News; and Google Mail. Googles head office in California, USA has been labelled as Googolplex. This architectural masterpiece has been designed to make the people who work in Google feel at home away from home. The atmosphere and environment is very much conducive and convenient for all the staff because all the facilities they need is available for them. 8:1 CONCLUSION There is ample evidence to show that Googles business strategy is indeed realistic, rationale, and viable and not as insane as claimed by Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer. The company have shown that they are capable of dominating all the associated businesses and activities on the internet. They have so far being aggressive in the search engine industry and for now there is no formidable challenger. They have also added more value to their brand name with all the strategic acquisitions they embarked upon since 2001. Truly speaking, unless something dramatic occurs in the realm of information technology; there is least probability that Google will collapse or fail. Even if they were to fail, it will create a big catastrophe in the information technology industry market which will be difficult to fulfil by any company. Googles business strategy has been accepted worldwide by the masses through the patronage of their services. The top management of the company headed by CEO Eric Schmidt needs to be more proactive in their recruitment and retention strategies so that expertise staff do not leave the firm to other arch rivals such as Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL. Gather (2009) sums up that Microsoft and Yahoo can try everything, but the large majority of people around the world will always "google" things, not "yahoo" or "bing" them, as Google has become a part of the language and culture more than any other internet search engine. And this will always give Google an upper hand in business because its strategy is indeed not insane.

REFERENCES

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v Hobson (2008) Googles recruitment strategy revealed Available from: (http://www.get.hobsons.co.uk/news/Working/607) Accessed on 12-11-2009

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v Shiels, M. (2009) Google to launch operating system. BBC News, Wednesday, 8th July, 2009. Available from: (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8139711.stm) Accessed on 12-112009.

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