Is Google Becoming Too Powerful? – Case Analysis
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Case Analysis
Is Google Becoming Too Powerful?
Introduction
Google was founded in 1998 by Larry
Google is using its financial strength to hit many of the traditional markets. Google sales ads in newspapers, magazines, radio, and, even on TV. Its suite of online office software, is threatening Microsoft Office domination. It is also disturbing the traditionally strong telecom industry with efforts to provide free wireless Internet access. Simply said, Google has become the largest and most efficiently financed Internet company.
Google Competitive Advantage
Google business model, can be broke down into three data inputs: relevancy of results, speed of search and cost of executing a search query. Although a typical Google query is often useless, users do not care because the results are extremely fast, and if wrong, they can easily start over. Time to results usually prevails over quality which might be offered by competitive search methodologies (Bing for instance). Google invest billions in its infrastructure to keep it fast, and thus protect its ad-based cash machine.
Google achieves extremely high search speed by indexing the Internet quite well. In order to deliver the search results from this index at a very high speed, Google maintains an infrastructure of fine-tuned specialized hardware and extreme bandwidth. Process-optimized infrastructure ensures low cost of executing a query. Googles infrastructure remains a big barrier to entry for its rivals.
Google is setting up the architecture for media and commerce in todays digital world. Google is building a map out of tens of thousands of servers around the world that handle enormous amount of data, in order to address the immense expansion of Internet. Google gains more knowledge and more power with each new search. It puts Google in a position to define how does the world looks like and where does the it goes.
Problems and Challenges
Googles explosive growth raises many questions, including potential challenges from regulators. By most measures, Google enjoys a search monopoly.
One of the observed issues is the use of their PageRank technology. The way it is assigned to web sites is a trade secret. Some aspects of Googles algorithms seem to penalize entire categories of web sites that compete with Google. Examples include news aggregation services and shopping comparison sites, which compete with Googles own aggregation and comparison services.
Threatened by the regulators, Google made some changes to its Universal Search behavior, to include more results from 3rd-party services.
Privacy issues are among the top issues. Most of the Google technologies such as Googles immortal cookie, recording of Internet IP address, the time and date, search terms, and browser configuration, retention of all data indefinitely, Googles toolbar are there to collect user date without even slightly notifying the user.
Another known issue was the copyright issue, when Google began digitizing of books from various libraries in 2004. Google did not ask publishers permission to copy the books and make parts of them publicly available.
Probably the broadest concern Googles presence