The Corporate Culture Present In Google Strengths Leadership Marketing Essay

Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are the leaders of Google. They are the strength of the company as they have a unique innovation style of leading and motivating as well as their vision for information sharing is unique too. All these three are the key decision makers they run the company as a triumvirate as they believed that shared judgment and extra energy available between them will benefit Google.

[http://www.google.com/corporate/]

The key strategy driver for the company is its innovation power. Employees in Google are encouraged to think outside the box while striving for new processes and product. Google has a major Goal as “Working on technology that can improve on existing ways of doing business”

[http://www.google.com/corporate/business.html]

Products such as Gmail and Google Mini were one of their innovative ideas which was created internally with the support and feedback of its leaders. The culture of “Don’t do evil” has allowed developers to focus on products and services that add value for the customer in a way that other companies have not done.

Corporate Culture

The Corporate Culture present in Google is unique in its own was. The company has a small business feel which originates directly from the creators of the company. People are found more dressed casual than corporate. Even though there are over 20,000 employees worldwide it maintains a informal or small business kind of feel. Every employee eats at the office café at the lunch time by sitting at whichever table has an opening and also enjoys wonderful conversation with Googlers from Different team. The Leaders say their commitment to innovation depends on everyone being comfortable sharing ideas and opinions. [http://www.google.com/corporate/culture.html.]

In 2010 Fortune Magazine ranked Google 4th best place to work in the United States of America.

The working atmosphere at Google allows employees to avoid their outside worries in order to focus on their work or the task given. To help this there are onsite day care, fitness facilities and free meals facilities available at the company.

(http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2010/).

Mission Statement

It is the belief at Google in information sharing and open processes that have spawned their mission statement “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google collects information which is needed by people around the globe and makes it available online for them to use it.

[http://www.google.com/corporate/]

Brand Equity

As a biggest search engine all over the world Google has derived Brand’s power from the goodwill and name recognition it has earned over time. Google has topped a list of the world’s most powerful brands, with new research estimating its value to be $86bn (£43bn).

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/21/googlethemedia.digitalmedia]

Google Users

Google is available in 160 countries around the globe and provides 117 different languages according to the user’s preference. The per day search queries Google gets is about 200 million out of which half the queries come from United States. Even in china 24% of internet users use Google as their search engine. This shows that how famous Google is in its search engine.

[http://investor.google.com/documents/2007_Google_AnnualReport.html ]

[ http://forum.famouswhy.com/index.php?showtopic=18846] 

Ancillary services

Google provides many ancillary services like Gmail which provides e-mail services, Video Ad, Ad Word, Ad Sense these provide the means of advertisement, Community sites like Orkut where users enjoy their social life, shopping services like Google Shopping and etc

Data Storage

Google has a very strong hardware infrastructure which allows them to hold huge capacity of data. The raw data gathered for the web by the Google search crawler is calculated about 850 Terabyte.

220 Terabyte of storage is required by Google Analytics which uses 200 Terabyte space for raw data and 20 Terabyte for the summaries. More than 70.5 Terabyte of storage space is required by Google Earth out of which 70 Terabyte is used for raw imagery and the left for index data which serves tens of thousands of queries per second per datacenter with low latency. Google uses a Bigtable format to store personalized search as it does not requires too much of data storage.

Google’s community site which is Orkut only takes about 9 Terabyte of data storage space

Google compresses it data to about 11% which means 850 Terabyte is compressed to 88 Terabyte. Therefore Google uses all together 220 Terabyte of data storage after compressing.

[http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-much-data-does-google-store.html]

Employment Opportunities

Google creates large amount of employment opportunities for highly-qualified individuals, and doctorates. Even the recruitment site of Google has a slogan which says “Google seeks to hire only the best”.

[http://nostarch.com/download/google_ch4.pdf]

On an average Google receives around 1300 resumes a day, out of which only the best ones are selected. There was seen an increase of 16 employees per day in the workforce of Google. At the end of 2003 it had 1628 employees, then in 2004 it went to 3021, 5680 in 2005, and at present Google has approximately about 20,123 full-time employees.

[ http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/410-google-refines-its-recruitment-process]

http://investor.google.com/corporate/faq.html]

[http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_employees_at_Google]

Weaknesses

Leadership

As leadership is Google’s strength it is its primary weakness also. As it has a centralized decision making system therefore when decision are being made only few figures end up with the final say. Even if there are board of directors with voting rights the two founders that is Larry Page and Sergey Brin have 52% of voting power which means they have a huge stake of control of the company’s strategy. As Google is there creation they may have bias in their decisions about the strategy of the company As both the creators are too much entrenched in the company it may be difficult for either of them to look at the company with an outside set of eyes or from a different view.

[http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2637055/google_founders_will_resign_from_decision.html?cat=15)]

Search Based Advertising:

Search based advertising means, when a query is searched the result gives the information in the form of ads which are sometimes paid. A recent survey stated that 99% percentage of Google’s revenue comes from search based advertising and only 1% comes from sales of its enterprise search appliance. This can be a weakness for Google as total concentration is into search based advertising.

[http://krishnan.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!40D9B80F5DA0227B!573.entry]

Content is arbitrary: (Copyright)

The information which Google provides is an arbitrary means most of its contents are confidential and are very important data which can sometime be a weakness if provided without proper rights. In the eyes of some media companies, Google’s business relies on exploiting content the company doesn’t own.

[http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_strategy/top_5_google_weaknesses.html]

Opportunities

Move into non-internet markets

Google should enter in to non-internet markets also, non-internet markets refers to opening of its own Magazine or starting up its own TV show, or can even starts it own Travel Packages. This will surely increase the company’s revenue and will also help in its innovation. [http://www.wikiswot.com/SWOT/17_Software___Services/Google.html]

China Internet Usage

People in China spend 70% of their leisure time surfing on net even the TV is fast replaced by Internet as an entertainment source. Most of the internet users are found to be youngsters. Even before buying a particular item people search about it on the internet. This is a very valuable market which can be taped by Google.

[http://www.chinainternetwatch.com/590/china-internet-obsession/]

Growing Economy

As China has a very vast growing economy and is the world’s largest and fastest growing internet market, Google has an opportunity to make a good market position.

Awareness and Information Seeking

One out of five consumers between the age range of 18-44 purchase a product or service after researching about it on the internet. Google should come up with some technology which can help people in seeking information on the go. These technologies can be installed at public places and should provide free services.

Introduce New Products that match market opportunities

As the volume of e-commerce in china has doubled from last year, Google should launch some shopping services. Popular example is Taobao.com which provides online shopping experience in china which also provides payment methods like pre-paid Taobao cards that are available for small commission at the post offices.

Threats

Different Government Regulatory Policy

Foreign business requires the approval of Chinese government; Google has opposed this getting in unsustainable position.

Aggressive Fast Moving Competitors

Competitors like Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and etc are looking for opportunities to enter Chinese market which can be a threat for Google.

[http://www.wikiswot.com/SWOT/17_Software___Services/Google.html]

Google has entered in to mobile market where its major competitor is Apple. Apple is growing very fast in its technology which is again a threat for Google’s mobile operating system called Android.

Privacy issues around content ownership

Google provides lot of information online which is not owned by the company. This can create legal issues for the company and can hold them against privacy issue around content ownership.

Cyber Crimes

Cyber Crime or Cyber Hack is a very big problem for Google which would result in exit of Google from Chinese market