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Case 21 Google Inc.:Running Amuck?
July 2009
Google’s announcement on July 7, 2009 that it would be adding a computeroperating system to its Chrome internet browser set off shock waves through theIT community. The much-heralded battle between Google and Microsoft fordominance of cyberspace had taken a major step closer. 代写留学生论文This emerging “Battle ofthe Titans” was a gift for news editors. Stock analysts were less impressed; theywere awaiting the announcement of Google’s second quarter financial results onJuly 15. Their key concern was that Google’s many ambitious new initiatives were
adding cost and distracting management at a time when advertising revenues werebeing squeezed by the economic downturn. Chris O’Brien of the San Jose MercuryCase 21 Google Inc.:Running Amuck?
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summed up the feelings of many in a blog entitled “Google’s growing identity
crisis”:
There are a handful of reasons people generally cite for Google’s success. Thepower of its search engine algorithm. The elegance of a business model thatmatches text ads to searches. A restless, innovative culture continually strivingto improve and evolve its products.
Here’s what always struck me about Google: its simplicity. At the start,Google did one thing phenomenally well. Its search engine was so superior thatthe company’s name became synonymous with search itself. And its home page
was, and remains, a visual model of simplicity: a sea of white space, the Googlelogo, a search box, a couple of links—and no ads.
The homepage aside, though, Google increasingly feels like a company runningin a thousand directions at once. Over the past year, it has released a steady streamof high-profile products that seem to have little or no relation to the core identityexpressed on its corporate homepage: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’sinformation and make it universally accessible and useful.” The problem is that inexpanding into so many different areas—productivity applications, mobileoperating system, a Web browser—that the identity of Google itself has become
muddled. No doubt, this all follows some clear logic from inside the Googleplex.But from the outside, it’s getting harder every day to articulate what Google is. Isit a Web company? A software company? Something else entirely?1
For Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders, the growing breadth of Google’sempire was a source of pride:
Every minute, 15 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube . . . Today we
are able to search the full text of almost 10 million books. While digitizing all theworld’s books is an ambitious goal, digitizing the world is even more challenging.Beginning with our acquisition of Keyhole (the basis of Google Earth) in October
2004, it has been our goal to provide high-quality information for geographicalneeds . . . Last year, AdSense (our publisher-facing program) generated morethan $5 billion dollars of revenue for our many publishing partners . . . Inaddition to Gmail and Google Docs, the Google Apps suite of products nowincludes Spreadsheets, Calendar, Sites, and more . . . Google Translate supports
automatic machine translation between 1640 language pairs . . .2The concern of many stock analysts was that most of Google’s diversifying
initiatives did nothing to boost revenue, let alone generate profit. The FinancialTimes’ Lex column dubbed Google a “one-trick pony”: “Google has what amountsto a