Google Case Study Solution

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o Applications: Such as, Google Docs, Gmail and YouTube.

o Clients: Such as, Google Chrome, Google Pack and Google Desktop. o Google Geo- Maps, Earth, and local.

o Android and Google mobile. o Google Checkout.

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o Google Labs.

- Price: Most of Google products and services are free to users.

- Place: anyone with a lab top, PC, smartphone, or a tablet can access most of Google products and services.

- Promotion: High quality users experience increase website traffic and great world of mouth promotions.

Environment and Competitions

The Technology industry is rapidly changes with many new competitions and new

technologies. Google is facing huge competitions in every aspect of the business. Part of the

competitions comes from well established companies.

Competition

o Search engine Google is competing directly with Yahoo and Microsoft

Corporation’s Bing.

o Google competes with e-commerce sites that been used to search for products and services such as WebMD, Kayak and Amazon.

o Users relying more on social networks, such as, Facebook, Yelp, and Twitter for searching rather than traditional search engines.

o TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, billboard and yellow pages competing with Google as a forms of advertising.

o Mobile applications can be faster easier way to access companies’ products and services, instead of through search engine.

o Online products and services providers, such as Dailymotion competition with YouTube.

In general Google competes on the basis of the relevance and usefulness of search results and

features, availability, and ease of use of Google products and services.

Business Level Strategy

Google differentiated itself from competitors by focusing on its main product, which is its

search engine. The company enhanced the user experience and made the search process easier than

in the past. Google’s model is give the users best search results by ranking the most related result

first. Also, the Google didn’t accept any payments to change the results’ ranking to benefit other

businesses. Moreover, Google didn’t impose any fees for providing its services. Furthermore, the

simple design of its homepage and the enhanced search results gave the company a competitive

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advantage and attracted more users each year. In addition, Google has products and services other than the search engine such as Google Translate, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Doc and many other services that are part of the people’s daily use applications. Also, Google acquired many well-established businesses such as YouTube, Android, Picasa and other websites and applications, which gave the company the chance to increase its presence and compete in different markets.

Corporate Level Strategy

As mentioned in the previous section, Google acquired many other businesses in different markets, which made the company so diversified and powerful at the same time. Google’s differentiation strategy and its ability to provide exactly what the users are looking for helped the company to grow globally since search engines are considered global services. Also, Google realized the importance of the international markets and started to provide its services with 42 different languages. Google was able to help other businesses to promote their products and services locally and internationally depending on the type of business, which increased Google’s revenues each year. However, Google is still has to consider some international laws and as mentioned in the case, the company could hide some results based on the country’s requirement.

Also, one of the key factors for Google’s success is its employees, Google encourages its employees to share with the top management any idea that would bring revenues to company or would improve its current products and services. This strategy allowed Google to capture any potential opportunity in the local and global markets.

Performance Level Strategy

Google achieved remarkable levels when it comes to revenues and profits. As per the company’s financial statements, Google was able to increase its net income from $399 million in

2004 to more than $6.5 billion in 2009. This huge increase in the net income indicates that the

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company is growing fast. As a result, many investors were interested to buy Google’s stock shares.

Also, Google invested heavily on R&D which gave the company a competitive advantage in the market, it spent more than $2.8 billion on that segment in 2009. Moreover, one of the strong financial indicators of Google’s balance sheet is that it has enough cash and assets to cover its liabilities, which is reflected on the overall company’s value.

SWOT Analysis:

Strengths

Weaknesses

∙ Better search engine than competitors.

∙ Lack of income diversification since

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