The Future of Google Inc - Case Study Example

The Future of Google Inc. Part Q1. Corporate Entrepreneurial strategy Corporate Entrepreneurial strategy is a technique which involves widespread and mostly change in the decision pattern in an organization. It depends upon the aim of an organization whether it is profit making or innovation. Firms which are into too much of innovation need to change their decision making process so that they can put some new ideas. Google is a technology oriented company that deals with internet related services. Google’s vice president for user experience and search products is Marissa Mayer. She holds the company’s efforts on various search products like books, news, images, web search, Google Desktop, Google Toolbar, Google earth, Google Labs and Google Health. She became the first female engineer in 1999 and led the Web server teams and user interface teams (Murray, 2006). Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page encourage idea motivation all the time at all levels in the organization. They influence employees to share their ideas and mail which is open to everyone in the company, then the list is been sorted by the founders and the best ideas were again revised by the upper management. Marissa Mayer work is to sort out names from the list again and launch the new ideas in the company. As the company’s revenue is near about $24 billion with 19,000 active working employees, her job was becoming too complicated day by day. Since, everyone’s idea was not accepted and only the best ones were picked, the hatred between vice president and the employees with rejected proposals were increasing. Employees started thinking that the vice president was unable to connect with the PHDs and MBAs and that is the reason their ideas were not accepted because she could not manage it (Finkle, 2012). When some projects were delivered, she use to manage the whole process very nicely by discussing ideas and brainstorming sessions in the office hours, she use to keep aside all the rules and regulations and get into informal conversation just to ensure that ideas were flowed in a right way but the major drawback was the communication gap regarding to ideas because employees were getting dishearten and the same process of sorting ideas use to take place in the company which created disturbance between the employees and the vice president, which use to affect work sometimes. Here it is seen that corporate entrepreneurial strategy was lagging behind because of communication gap (Steiber and Alänge, 2013). Q2. Entrepreneurial Strategy Google’s approach to idea is an “entrepreneurial strategy” and not a “strategy for entrepreneurship”. Google is always in the search of new ideas and concepts both from outside and inside. They always have the tendency to ask employees about their opinion and reviews. For example, once Mayer was having a chat with her worker in 2003. Suddenly she realised about a person named Steve Lawrence who is an Australian engineer. He was working on a project where he developed software which would allow his computer to search any files or content and it was running on the operating system called Linux (Spector, Norvig and Petrov, 2012). Mayer thought of contacting Lawrence and she had a discussion with him. It was decided that Lawrence will make this software run in any of the computer and Mayer will provide him with a team to handle and support his work. This was successful very soon and in October 2004 this concept was launched in all the computers leaving behind Microsoft back in two months only. One more example of entrepreneurial strategy is Mayer is always exposed to new ideas; she spends three times of her weekly office time towards brainstorming of new ideas. A team only gets 5 minutes for their case and the main aim is to gain Mayer’s approval just to take their idea forward for implementation. Many ideas came across Mayer’s table like providing all the languages in Google websites, to provide a direct link for Hurricane Katrina victims direct from the home page of Google, to provide new software which will help Google close to the search engines, which will keep a track on users’ first preference and will provide people with relevant suggestion so that they can improve their results (Kay, 2012). The search engine idea was a big hit and it made work very fast and easy. People now got Google support for their related search. Strategy for entrepreneurship is a bit risky task as setting a particular task for a company is not profitable. Strategies are made according to the market situation and no one decide it before setting up the company. Google with its various examples has proved that it follows entrepreneurial strategy as it give chance to their employees for new ideas and are implemented too according to customer’s need and comfort. For a successful background, innovation is necessary at every stage for both big and small firms (Saul, 2010). Q3. Factors evident for entrepreneurial strategy It is understood by now that Google has devoted most of their time in Entrepreneurial strategy and that is the main reason of their success. They always tried to keep improving their ideas whenever it is required and they were successful with all the ideas they came out with. Google innovate related search engine, different languages, link for Hurricane Katrina victims and many more. To ensure that the idea concept is working efficiently, Mayer has to be very specific while evaluating that the idea has no flaws (Forbes, 2013). For example, Mayer maintains Top 100 priority list for so many years so that projects can be ranked according to its importance. The list was very helpful for Mayer since it helped to track and prioritize Google’s varying projects. As the company’s progress project list kept on increasing and it reached to an unbelievable number that is 270. Since, there was enormous number of projects, which was not so necessary was stopped. Projects were removed due to overflow; it should be kept in mind that ideas should not be missed from getting in the market. It should be seen that ideas now or before, it should come to the market soon (Mashable, 2010). It is felt sometimes that Mayer is the head of the family who bind employees in one group. It is Mayer who is responsible to keep the family happy. She was selected as the youngest woman in the list of most powerful women in Fortune. Her talent of keeping access to its employees and giving importance to their ideas has made Google successful and lead their competitors to failure. So, it is seen that to develop entrepreneurial strategy, Google has adapted many new ideas and it will keep developing in the future also (Forbes, 2013). Part 2. Innovative strategy of Google and its competitors Innovation and Google go side by side. The dimension of Google products is very huge, starting from the search functions to android, to ads, maps, to clouds, glass to analyze the surface. Google’s innovative ideas comes from where, who implement and works on them is a mystery. Google’s leadership has declared that innovation is an open objective for all of the employees and everyone should think about it. Even before innovation was not much everywhere, Google declared to everyone as their responsibility. To keep a good relation with the the employees is part of Google’s culture. Google has released nine principle’s of innovation that is Focus on the user, bet on technical insights, Think 10X, innovation should be done from everywhere, 20% time, Launch and iterate, fail well, default to open process and have a mission that matters (Forbes, 2013). Google has put some guidelines on 20% time which says that employee spend one day of a week on side projects, employees do forecasting on field about the decline of innovation in the company that says utilize your power for a good cause and not for evil. If Google has asked their employees to spend 20% time, it is a smart move as urgency without assignment is a waste of energy, there’s an enclosed room to explore and focus on free thinking builds a change environment in the culture (Mashable, 2010). Yahoo had no strategy in the starting, but the only strategy they had was the flexibility which worked for yahoo very well. They use to recruit employees who use to think out of the box and allowed the creative energies to make some billion dollars for the company. The aim was to create new markets, new products and new industries basically thinking about the future too much. Launch of products were not followed by any advertisements or announcement in fact it was done very quietly. Initially, company focused on branding, flexible work culture and innovation. Yahoo always aims to make a position in the future market and not to just grab the market but to make long term goodwill. Yahoo always asked engineers to work on the project because they believe that product edge does not lose because of human resource scarcity (Mashable, 2010). Yahoo believed in collaboration but there were many big players which were difficult to acquire. The concept of ‘how-to’ solve the problem and get new ideas where always clear, organized and focus and hence help to deal with the difficult situations which are unforeseen. Yahoo was dependent on dot com companies too much for its advertising revenues and all of a sudden dot com company resulted into substantial loss.They should deal with more companies because dependence on particular company can create more problems in the future like dot com. Revenue lines should be broadened as the environment gets changed. They should target sectors which are not so affected by the economic slowdown. They should promote services which are country specific. They should set operational bases in many countries to improve their global reach. They enjoy the former mover advantage all the time in the internet (Yahoo news, 2015). Table 1: Difference between Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. Basis of distinction Google Inc. NASDAQ: GOOG Yahoo Inc. NASDAQ:YHOO Visitors Google has 528 million visitors. Yahoo has 476.3 million visitors. Number of innovation Google has done 75 innovations which include 25 collaborations, 44 new products and 6 acquisitions. Yahoo has done 77 innovations which include 37 collaborations, 38 new products and 2 acquisitions. Social media Google has very less social media touch. Yahoo has more social media. Strategy Google focuses on acquiring and building social media powerhouses (Twitter). Yahoo focuses on integrations which are existing popular media (e.g. Flickr) Focus Google focus on building and maintaining technology which will lead to revenue, adoption and information through doors only. Yahoo focus is to bring more attention to the same content and to keep it for a long span of time. (Forbes, 2013) Figure 1: Revenue Comparison of Google and Yahoo (Forbes, 2013) It is been analyzed in the graph that Google revenue is more than Yahoo revenue. If the gap between Google and Yahoo is examined in respect of quarterly revenue, quarterly net profit margin, quarterly net income, stock performing gains and yearly innovations, the whole scenario becomes clear that innovative strategies are more in Google. The number of innovations and gross innovations is the main area where Yahoo and Google have the main parity (Yahoo news, 2015). It is been analyzed that at the quarter end, Yahoo has revenue of $1.67 billion and Google has revenue of $3.66 billion. The revenue gap is of $1.99 billion even more yahoo’s revenue. Google is growing internationally as well as in the U.S. Google is in the plans to develop interest among youth and children in the fields of technology, science, mathematics and engineering. They are trying to make their presence felt in classrooms by adopting new initiatives in education. Google has established the first innovation centre in the UAE along with the new gizmos and gadgets for students to experiment. The students will get the opportunity to analyze gadgets themselves and will get the advantage of knowledge from various education specialist (Yahoo news, 2015). It seems as if Google wants to do each and everything as in from making automatic cars to making of human skin. In the span of two years, the hub which is build in UAE will also serve a place to merge education with the best of technology. This new hub will be filled with various learning instruments which will include humanoid robots, radio controlled model aircraft, programmable robots, scientific tools like probes and data loggers, drones, scanners and 3D printers, ICT, virtual robotics and math-graphic tools. Various workshops and exchange of good practice in the hub will be conducted by Google educator groups. There will be teachers to conduct the class and they will teach the basics of technology for education and they may even teach various Google tools like Drive, Gmail, You Tube and more (Yahoo news, 2015). In UAE, the market share of search engine is hold by Google with 89.9% share, yahoo with 3%, Bing with 3.2%, Conduit with 0.9% and Asks with 1.3%. Google generate a lot of money from the ad sense, Ad words and Gmail services. Google’s IPO has been very successful. It was even heard that Google is planning to increase the Gmail storage space from 2GB to 10 GB. If this idea comes into existence than the rival like Yahoo will be in a big problem. Yahoo market will be declined and they will lose their power in the market. In the coming years, Google will expand its business sphere by improving its operating system and will challenge Yahoo and Microsoft and will be at the top of the software market (MVF, 2015). Although, it is seen that Google is progressing inevitably, it has to face some challenges later. In the recent announcement, Google was the topper of the “Customer Experience Rankings” list in search engines which was followed by MSN, Yahoo. Since that point of time, MSN and Yahoo started bringing important changes in their methods. MSN and Yahoo from that time made enormous in various areas and slowly the gap between Google and rival will come down. This was a big challenging factor for Google as they now have to improve to make better features compare to its competitors so that they don’t lose their regular users because of MSN and Yahoo search. This does not mean that Google is coming to an end because; it has a big advantage of generating new idea, of 10 GB Gmail. This was a major concern to its competitors. It may happen that using Gmail may lead to some charges and then users may shift to Yahoo so there are many issues related to it. As the innovative ideas has no end to it, likewise success to the company is also very flexible, it can shift to any company at any point of time. So, every company should always work for its continuous efforts so that they can succeed in their objective (MVF, 2015). Reference list Finkle, T.A., 2012. Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Silicon Valley: The Case of Google, Inc. Entrepreneurship Theory and practice, 36(4), pp: 863-864. Forbes, 2013. Googles Best New Innovation: Rules Around 20% Time. [Online] Available at: [Accessed 9 May 2015]. Kay, L., 2012. Technological Innovation and Prize Incentives: The Google Lunar X Prize and Other Aerospace Competitions. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Mashable, 2010. Google vs. Yahoo: Who Has the Right Social Strategy? [Online] Available at: [Accessed 9 May 2015]. Murray, J. A., 2006. A concept of entrepreneurial strategy. Strategic management, 5(1), pp: 1-13. MVF, 2015. Lead Generation and internet marketing in UAE. [Online] Available at: [Accessed 9 May 2015]. Saul, J., 2010. Social Innovation, Inc.: 5 Strategies for Driving Business Growth through Social Change. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Spector, A., Norvig, P. and Petrov, S., 2012. Googles hybrid approach to research. Communications of the ACM, 55(7), pp.34-37. Steiber, A. and Alänge, S., 2013. A corporate system for continuous innovation: the case of Google Inc. European Journal of Innovation Management, 16(2), pp.243-264. Yahoo News, 2015. Google creates first innovation hub in UAE. [Online] Available at: [Accessed 9 May 2015]. Read More