Google’s Robust Business Strategy
Company Overview
Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. Google has also developed an open source web browser and a mobile operating system. The company is running millions of servers worldwide, which process hundreds of millions of search requests each day and about 1 petabyte of user-generated data every hour. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google is now widely recognized as the world’s largest search engine — an easy-to-use free service that usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second.
In the past decade, Google has gained the dominance position in the internet search engine business and in the course of becoming the leader in the business has outperformed the competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft who were dominating the industry for years. These competitors were not able to match the business model of Google and hence got off beaten in a very short span of time. This is because the robust business strategy of Google which is not so easy to understand and match. Let us examine this “Robust Strategy” of Google under various headings of main four sources of robustness:
Rarity:
A. Unique Resources: Google has the world’s one of the largest hardware network and information resource network. The recent massive development in the brand image of Google has resulted in gaining maximum number of customers which has also increased in the user participation for its information gathering. This huge number of customer base has also attracted maximum number of business to advertise their products and services through Google’s websites and services. The company also holds one of the world’s largest capital funding through its unique revenue earning model.
B. Preferred Access: Google has got preferred access in gaining the data information which are having restricted access for rest of the competitors.
C. Situation dependent: Google has strategized to mould its operations depending to the changing customer needs which provide it the flexibility in its service delivery to the global customers.
D. Sunk costs: Google had spent huge capital on building the data storage and linking network across the globe and building nodes and hubs at all locations to manage the data resources and gain customer requirement information.
Robustness of Resources and competences:
It is almost impossible for the present competitors to match the quality and quantity of the services provided by Google. The reasons are:
• The availability of huge capital for expenditure on the introduction of new technologies, research and development, and maintenance of present technologies.
• The company has the strategy to successfully acquire upcoming technologies at the right time and understand it’s future possibilities of success for new and future customers
• The Google maintains world’s largest and most advanced data storage capacity that is supported by about 1 million dollar per day on the maintenance of these huge resources across the storage and connecting sites on the globe.
• Such huge infrastructure has not been achieved yet even by the competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo.
• Google has also strategized to continuously spend huge amount on the infrastructure of these data resources and has world’s largest computer hardware manufacturing facility which it uses for building its own infrastructure.
• It has maximum customer share in the internet business with most number of clicks and visits that has attracted maximum number of small, medium and huge capital companies to advertise on its various websites.
• Such advertisements generate maximum revenues for the company as it is source of direct and continuous revenue for Internet service providers.
• Google continuously spend maximum amount in the whole industry to keep a track of the changing customer requirements and become the first provider of those services.
Complexity:
• The core competency of the Google lies in its best search engine service which has maximum databases linked internally and externally linked to it which are continuously updated 24X7 providing customized search options (based on file type, country specific search, duration of uploading, etc.) for all users across the globe.
• Google has many of its subsidiary service websites linked together to its main website portal i.e. www.google.com is internally linked/connected to Facebook, Picasa, YouTube, Google videos, Google books, Google maps etc. which are provide a single platform access to these services.
• Google also provide its unmatched global positioning and location services through Google maps which is highly detailed and consumer supported service for almost every country and its various cities providing details of popular destinations of entertainment, health facilities, government departments, restaurants, companies, local places, etc.
• The data storage facility of the Google websites is also providing the users to store unlimited data on Google servers at free of cost which proved to be the best strategy in the market resulting in migration of huge percentage of customers shifting to the services of the Google’s mail service.
• Picasa service of Google also replaced many traditional Microsoft and other companies’ image applications by providing easy sharing using upload and download service of image with unlimited capacity and highly fast speed due to the advanced fast speed network of Google across the globe.
• Google services to these accounts are accessible using single account name and password so that the user is not required to maintain separate accounts with the linked websites and services.
• These complex services are also securitized using advanced technology which provides best secured data storage and transmission.
Culture:
Google has its unique culture across its organization where the company promotes creativity among its employees and gives them ample opportunities to develop these creative skills so as to cope up with the constantly changing external business environment. It encourages its employees to work in informal manner and daily spend some time to think out of the box of which its playful variations on its own corporate logo are an indicator. This kind of open to ideas approach by the company has proved to be one of the most successful factors for the company. Thus Google’s organic approach has provided it to continuously enhance its service quality by continuous upgradation.
Causal Ambiguity:
The competitors of Google like Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. are unclear about the key basis of the success of the company. They are not able to understand the basis of the robust business strategy of the company where it successfully forecasts the future needs of its customers and how it maintains it highly and massive infrastructure that has proved to be unmatched by the market players.
All these factors combined, gives Google a business model which is unmatched by its competitors and can thus be concluded as the Robust Strategic Model. This gives Google the competitive advantage in the internet industry which is not easy to imitate as it holds the secret strategy of Google towards its competitive external and internal environment.
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