Google?

What is Google?

Via John Battelle, Rick Skrentas remarkable piece on what Google have actually built. They don’t just have the world’s best search engine; they have the world’s largest and most scalable platform for developing huge web-based applications.

Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It’s a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, and probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively runs 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.

Who are Google’s Competitors?

These are some of Google’s adversary:

Yahoo! Inc.

MSN

AOL,

Disney Online

Match.com, LLC

Sina Corp.

Daum Communications Corp.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AT GOOGLE

The focus of information technology at Google for both software and hardware is speed and cost.

These two metrics are valued more than any other criteria such as reliability of machines or high performance enterprise computing hardware. Ultimately, the result must transform a response time of user query using Google’s search engine to be completed within a one second time-frame. Started in Larry Page’s dormitory room, the information technology at Google has transformed into a full-blown large cluster PC network that functions similar to a computing grid. Even though information technology infrastructure has changed dramatically over the years, the model of IT use at Google has stayed the same. This model follows the original principles adopted by the co-founders of building a prototype system that uses commodity hardware and intelligent software. The shift of computer industry with PCs becoming commodity electronic hardware over the years has worked in favor of Google’s IT strategy in getting the best cost performance ratio (Patterson & Hennessy, 2004). Thus, instead of purchasing the latest microprocessors, Google IT performs calculations to look for the best value of processing power per dollar and purchasing many PCs that are only a few months old in the market, but at a much lower discounted price. This is suitable for Google because the framework of their search engine is built around parallelizing many user query requests across multiple machines and if more processing is required, the system can simply increase more machines to serve even greater user requests. The overall price per performance is more important than individual peak performances, and this enables Google to achieve superior speed at a fraction of the cost rather than using a few, but expensive high-end server systems. The end equation for Google’s IT in selecting machines is calculated by the cost per query, and is derived by the sum of capital expenses and operating costs divided by performance. For accuracy, the calculation takes into inherent effects due to hardware depreciation and maintenance repairs. At the data centers, the primary cost factor is capital expenditure credited to hardware, followed by personnel and hosting costs (Barozzo, et al., 2003).

What are the services that Google offer?

Key Product and Services

Online advertising is Google’s core product and accounts for 90% of the company’s revenue. AdWords, a cost-per-click pricing scheme, was a result of Google’s newly formed business Model in online advertising. AdWords allows advertisers to pay Google once visitors click on an Advertisement after entering a search query. Unlike other online marketing that use image and animated banners, these advertisements are text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design. This is a concept that Google’s co-founders believe is essential for an enjoyable user search engine experience since most users typically want to find information and promptly leave the search results page. Increasing the covered audience is a complementary product called AdSense which involves placing targeted AdWords advertisements on Google’s partner websites

Product/Service Name Description

Google Earth - Satellite imagery of geographical locations

Google Maps - View driving maps and directions

Google Local - Search for local businesses and shops

Google News - Search for news stories

Google Video - Search for TV programs and video clips

Google Desktop Search - Search for offline information stored on computers

Google Image Search - Search for images online

Google Sketch Up - 3D model design tool

Google Checkout - Online payment processing service

Google Search Appliance - Enterprise search engine

GMail - Web-based email client

GTalk - Internet instant messaging and VoIP

Orkut - Online social network community

Froogle - Electronic shopper product search

Others:

Google Page Creator, Google Analytics, Picasa, Blogger, Google Mobile, Google

SMS, Google Finance, Google Groups, Google Scholar, Google Pack, Google Book

Search, Google Code, Google Alerts, Google Calendar

What is Google’s unique advantage?

One thing that has become evident to me is that Google grows in an organic fashion, unlike any other company I know of. Google develops tools that are internally useful and then releases them to the world. Google does not develop products to sell to the world. Google does not have external contracts, at least in the traditional sense, as far as I can tell.

Let me elaborate on this. Google is obviously best known for search and for ads associated with search. This is in essence Google’s one true product. It is the one feature Google developed for the outside world. When Google developed search it was no different from a small company. It is what Google has done since then that makes Google different.

Google doesn’t answer to any external power. They don’t have anyone they have to deliver a product to. There is no contract with a deadline. Due to not having any external dependencies, Google can continuously iterate over a product until it reaches a state of near perfection. It can stay in internal testing as long as Google wants and no one is going to care. See Gmail, Google Maps, etc. This then allows Google to use the perfect form of the agile process. Continuous iterations and testing and development, continues improvement. Then as Google sees fit, release the products. As they get better and better, more people use them and more money from ads comes in. It’s beautiful.

It’s also unlikely any other company is going to be able to pull this off. Google hit on the formula for ads before anyone else. They now have such a commanding lead in that arena that to compete with them you need deep pockets of money of your own. That makes it difficult to launch a company and follow Google’s lead of avoiding external dependencies and having the near perfect product development process.

At this point, you might be screaming at me that I’m wrong, because Google does have external contracts, especially for serving up ads on other sites. But notice that Google’s contracts are different from most companies’ contracts. Google isn’t developing a product for these companies. All they are doing is giving them an existing product that Google has already completed and released. Development on that product might still be happening, but it happens within Google, not within the realms of the contract. Google is still free to develop how ever they want.

For almost everyone else, you’re going to have to create a product and then drive sales of that product or else sign a contract and then deliver a custom product to the customer. You’ll have external dependencies that will force an outside reality upon you that Google simply doesn’t have. You can argue that Google is dependent upon ads, but at this point Google has captured such a large share of that market and is steadily capturing more of it, that it really isn’t a dependency for Google. Sure, Google should probably diversify; just in case the ad market tanks, but at this point Google has so much money they can afford to take their time.

Global Expansion

The international markets are critical for many technology companies in expanding new business opportunities and generating more revenues. Similarly, this principle is reminiscent in Google’s case, as the international markets contribute from 30% to 40% of the company’s total revenues every quarter for the past two years.4 In order to tap into the international market, Google’s search engine has been translated to allow multi-language search capabilities, while maintaining its philosophy of objective and unbiased search results (Brin, 2001). The strong international markets for Google include the United Kingdom, Western Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australia. Google has transformed from a start-up firm to a multi-national corporation; however, the majority of its employees are still based in the Mountain View headquarters. Google has international presence in all continents of the world other than Africa and Antarctica. However, the location of its international employee base is divided into two primary groups: engineering and product development team, and a sales force team. Google offers customer interfaces in over 40 different languages and close to 50 different currency exchanges to date.

Conclusion

In only a short period of time, Google has become a dominant player in search technology and a formidable threat to many other technology firms in various industry sectors including advertising, standard software, web application development, and telecommunication networks. Behind the scenes, the use of information technology has been strategic and critical for Google’s search engine success and other Google products and services. A variety of advanced concepts in computer science have been applied to many of Google’s products and services ranging from topics in distributed systems, machine learning, software architecture, and communications networks. Google’s vision of applying advanced computing concepts and innovative ideas has allowed the company to stay as a forefront leader. However, there are even greater challenges for Google as it matures into a multi-national corporation. How will Google be able to enter international markets where information dissemination is highly regulated and controlled by the foreign governments? Can Google continue to sustain its rapid growth while continue to hold on its unique work culture? With the massive amount of information collected on a daily basis, will Google invade privacy concerns? Will Google be able to maintain its technology leadership as competition gets even more intense? And how real is the threat from Microsoft as it claims to defend itself and compete rigorously with Google in the search market? The story behind Google is only a start. Only time will tell Google’s destiny. Many futurists predict that Google may perhaps become the most important technology company this decade, similar to how Microsoft and Intel have changed the technology industry in the past.

References:

Google.com