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Essay / Case Study: The Success of Google Company
Table of ContentsThe History of GoogleThe Reasons for SuccessEarly Recognition and EffectivenessThe Business ModelContinuous InnovationChanges and the FutureGoogle is one of the largest, most successful and most successful media companies best known in the world, with over 60,000 employees in over 50 countries, owning and providing services like Gmail, Google Maps, Google Chrome, Android, of course Google Search and many more. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayThe History of Google“The history of Google begins in 1995 at Stanford University. Larry Page was considering Stanford for graduate school, and Sergey Brin, a student there, was assigned to show him around. as it is written on the Google web page. In 1995, Sergey Brin was already studying at Stanford University, and Larry Page was planning to study there. In 1996, they began working on a search engine project called BackPub. The name BackPub comes from how the software works because it ranks web pages based on the number of backlinks they have. Larry and Sergey launched the software in March 1996 from Larry's Stanford home page. To be able to use and sort the data collected by BackPub, they developed a page ranking algorithm. While analyzing BackPub's results, which consisted of ranked backlinks, Larry and Sergey noticed that their software, based on page rankings, produced better and more useful results than existing techniques. This search engine continued to run from Stanford's servers for a year. After this time, on September 15, 1997, Google.com was registered. The name Google comes from the mathematical term googol. It's the number. 1 followed by 100 zeros. "Rumor has it that this reflects the founders' mission to organize the endless amount of information on the Internet." In August 1998, a $100,000 check from Andy Bechtolsheim was written for the then-non-existent company. The founders opened a bank account and continued to work with Bechtolsheim's investment. On September 4, 1998, Google was incorporated as a private company. Their first famous office was a garage in Menlo Park, California. After a year in 1999, the company moved from the garage to its new office at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto. They needed to move, because in 1999 they already had 8 employees and of course their famous team member Yoshka, the dog. Later, Google received a $25 million offer from Kleiner Perkins Caufield, Byers and Sequoia Capital, as they saw the potential in the company. After a year, Google was already Yahoo's search engine. Google's results surprised all its competitors. At that time, the company's only revenue came from licensing its technology and focused exclusively on algorithmic search. Over the next few years, Google continued to grow. They hired engineers, scientists, sales and marketing and moved to their new headquarters in Mountain View, California, which is a huge campus called The Googleplex. On the other hand, over the years, Page and Brin repeatedly tried to sell the company to Yahoo, Excite, and many other Silicon Valley companies for a price tag of $1 million. As Brian O'Connell wrote, fortunately for both the founders and all the employees and investors, none of the attempts were successful and Google retained its grip on the search engine market. Google went public in 2004 and became one of thelargest media companies. It launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, Google+ in 2011 and many others. Reasons for Success As mentioned above, Google has become one of the largest, most well-known and most successful media outlets. companies in the world, but how did they manage it, what were or are the success factors? “There is perhaps no better testament to Google’s success than the fact that it has become a verb.” In my opinion, there are 4 main sources of success, namely: Early recognition and effectiveness. The business model. Continuous innovation. Governance structure and corporate culture. Early recognition and effectiveness. As the Internet has increased the need for a tool, a suitable search engine that brings together and orders information on the Web has also developed. Prototypes and already existing search engines used keyword frequency as the basis for their ranking, leading to irrelevant listings and frustration among users. Using this software, you had to read an average of 10 results to get to what you were looking for. This problem was solved in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their original job was the sorting and increasing collection of information with algorithms. Additionally, their software assigned scores to the results, based on specific criteria. So, instead of employing human capital to review results, they developed a page ranking system. This system preferred pages linked to each other. The more references there were, the more important the given page was. This criterion made it possible to determine where the page found could be displayed among the search engine results. It quickly became clear that using this idea instead of word counting provided better results than existing software on the market. Of course, Google's search engine has undergone and is still undergoing upgrades to provide users with more appropriate results. “Because it started strong and kept getting better.” two-sided economic model. This means that although Google provides a free search engine for regular users, it collects countless data on almost everyone that could be used for commercial purposes. Google also needs to generate revenue, just like other companies. That's why he focuses on advertising. On the contrary, advertisements are not the only source of income. Google attracts visitors and sells advertising spaces at the same time. The business model works as follows: Google analyzes the user's online behavior and uses this information. From this data, Google builds its value proposition. According to Mohit Tater, there are 3 value propositions from which the economic model is built. There are different value propositions for different users, they actually follow the same philosophy, which is to offer targeted advertising. Value proposition number 1. The first targeted group is webmasters or people with a website. Google aims to help them make money from their content. Blogger.com is also powered by Google. This is a free platform for those who do not want to have their own separate website, but want to reach potential customers and be contacted by others. Another software for this purpose is called AdSense. AdSense also helps content creators earn money. The working mechanism of AdSense is as follows: it allows publishers to have Google advertisements on their website, so that they can profit from them. Using thissoftware, the content creator becomes a partner of Google and receives a percentage of the revenue generated by his website. This partnership is beneficial for both Google and the individual because Google can show ads on other pages not just itself and the individual gets attention. Value proposition number 2. The second service is for advertisers. These are individuals who own their own business, need to be contacted by customers more quickly and are willing to pay for it. Google has the largest online advertising network and has managed to conquer the advertising market, not like Bing or Yahoo. The so-called AdWords software is responsible for this success. Advertisers of any size i.e. start-ups, small businesses and even large enterprises can promote their service using Google Ads. Advertisers have the option to personalize their ad campaign by online based on their pricing and yield plan. They can define keywords, indicate who and where they want to advertise. The Google AdWords targeting service allows you to respond to demand and supply. It ensures that only relevant ad results are displayed. Thanks to the multi-faceted platform, Google has a major source of revenue. This source is advertising. The more ads are shown, the more Google earns from advertisers. But advertisers can't just buy ad space from Google, they must go through a differentiation process defined by AdWords. This approach places the company in a supreme position. “AdWords looks at keyword popularity and target audience narrowness, then comes up with a bid price per ad impression, cost per install, and cost per click.” Of course, higher search volume and greater popularity come with a higher price, which must be paid for the service. In conclusion, Google's revenue from AdWords allows the company to provide free software, which is value proposition number 3, such as the Gmail search engine and AdSense, the program that encourages creators to use the service of Google, so that it could succeed in online commerce and of course allows all Google products and services to be continuously improved. Continuous Innovation Improvement and upgrading are crucial in the life of a business these days. This usually means following trends. This is not entirely the case with Google. Although they are perfecting their processes, adding new designs and options, they always pay special attention to innovation. As I've seen while using and researching Google products, innovation plays an important role in business. Google underlines its importance and encourages its employees to be creative. The result of this behavior can be easily noticed: technology we can wear, driverless cars, mobile operating system, drone delivery system and many more. As money is no longer the main driver of the company, due to advertising revenue, it can focus on creating new things. A typical process at Google is to create a beta version of a program or project, release it, and constantly collect information and learn from data and customer feedback. First, they invest heavily in research. Billions of dollars are spent each year on research and development. Google usually invites scientists and university professors to its headquarters to give presentations orwork with the amount of data collected by Google. Google also invites small and young businesses, start-ups to use the data and work with Google members to help them develop or refine their ideas. Companies like these include Slack, Nest, 23andMe, and Walker and Company. On the other hand, Google not only helps these companies, it also learns from them. And secondly, this attitude towards innovation is present at all levels and reinforced with everyone. The best example of this behavior at Google is the so-called 20 percent rule, which means that employees must devote 20 percent of their working time to ideas, projects that they find interesting. (The rule will be explained in more detail later) This approach and this particular rule led to the existence of Google News, Gmail and AdSense. The attitude is: as long as it is possible to benefit from the idea or create something new, the company will try it. This mentality of Google is supported by its famous governance structure and company culture, which in my opinion is the fourth and important part of success. First, let me introduce both Google's governance structure and company culture, then go into detail. detail how they play an important role in Goggle's success. The following part on Google's governance structure refers to the ideas of Scott Thomson. Google has nothing unusual in its corporate structure other than some unique leadership positions like chief culture officer and chief internet evangelist. A board of directors oversees the company and provides instructions to the management group. The leadership group is responsible for departments such as engineering, product, legal, finance, and sales, but these departments are also divided into smaller departments. Originally, a business structure is built like this: there are the usual employees at the bottom, supervisors supervise them. , which are supervised by middle management and above all there is top management. This is called the vertical approach, where decisions are made at the top and executed at the bottom, as Heather Skyler describes. On the other hand, Google has a cross-functional organizational structure. It is essentially a matrix structure with a certain degree of flatness. This flatness is a considerable feature of the structure, which supports growth and competitiveness. There are 3 main features of Google's business structure: Bundling Feature Bundling Product Flatness. The function is used as a basis for grouping in the structure. This means that there are sales, engineering, and product management groups, as well as many other groups. The company also uses product grouping. This means that certain employees are responsible for the development of a particular mobile phone. And the third characteristic of the structure is flatness. The flatness of an organizational structure allows employees, teams, or groups to obtain and share information across hierarchical levels. Thanks to the flatness, they can communicate directly with senior management. This feature helps create a smaller, more comfortable corporate atmosphere because employees participate in decision-making. This leads to sentiment and highlights the importance of being equally important in the success of the business. Good and smart ideas play a more crucial role than titles. Google's governance structure supports its corporate culture by fostering continuous innovation, which,as we have already mentioned, is one of the main factors of Google's success. The joint work of corporate structure and corporate culture helps to develop competitive advantages over other giant media companies like Apple, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon.com, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. This is why Google is a good example of alignment to achieve growth and success. Google does not have a traditional organizational culture. This is partly due to alignment with the governance structure, but many other factors also play an important role. Google's company culture has 6 main characteristics as follows: Open Innovative Unique in hiring Celebrates failures Provides employees with a fun work environment Has its core values and mission statement Google is open to new and creative ideas. Employees know this, which is why they feel free to share their opinions and ideas. The matrix organizational structure simply allows you to continue to share information, in order to improve and bring ideas to life. In this way, the company also tries to motivate employees to challenge themselves and think in the usual way. Of course, they have support to accomplish these tasks. Google offers working conditions in a comfortable and warm atmosphere like in a small company, which simply makes it easier to be open and share ideas, even with Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I've already mentioned the 20% rule at Google. This is how the company encourages creativity and innovation, a key term in Google's corporate culture and success. The broadest definition of the 20 percent rule is the so-called 70/20/10 rule. The working mechanism is as follows: employees must devote 70% of their working time to the project they are currently working on. 20 percent should be spent on collecting ideas and creating new projects related to the main project. And in the remaining 10 percent, they can handle whatever other new ideas they have. This kind of freedom is one of the key forces behind the new products. Google receives about 3 million applications a year, but only hires about 7,000, according to data from July 2015. So there must be something in Google's hiring process that makes it possible to filter out this huge quantity of applications and find candidates who fit perfectly into Google's innovative and creative team. Of course, they ask a few questions to assess the candidate, but instead they look for candidates who are intellectual, fun, confident and ready to face and experience the unknown. Acceptance of failure also plays a crucial role at Google. The attitude towards failures is: if you fail, but share the failed project and experience with others, you are actually helping others not to fail. So you basically save resources and time for the company. Failing is an everyday occurrence, especially at companies like Google, which are faced with innovation and the unknown. This attitude motivates employees to dream bigger. In addition to this attitude towards failure, the media giant pays great attention to how it treats its employees. It offers countless benefits and a fun work environment. Employees can enjoy unlimited food and snacks, massages, health care, fitness center and gym membership, there are volleyball and basketball courts -ball, bowling alleys, etc. Additionally, Googlers are also allowed to take.”