The “GOOGLE” strategy

Who in this era doesn’t know of google and isn’t affected by it at least once in his lifetime. As Wikipedia mentions :

Google Inc. is an American multinational corporation specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include search, cloud computing, software and online advertising technologies. Most of its profits derive from AdWords.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 16 percent of its shares. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, and its unofficial slogan was “Don’t be evil”.

Google has been on a mission to be the number one and frankly speaking it has gained that position as even Microsoft Bing people will say it aloud if asked which search engine in the world is the best one.

The real evil of Google

But did you know that Google has been acquiring, on average, more than one company per week since 2010. Google has acquired over 100 companies, with its largest acquisition being the purchase of Motorola Mobility, a mobile device manufacturing company, for $12.5 billion. In a post on Google’s blog, Google Chief Executive and co-founder Larry Page revealed that the acquisition of Motorola was a strategic move to strengthen Google’s patent portfolio.  Most of the firms acquired by Google are based in the United States, and, in turn, most of these are based in or around the San Francisco Bay Area.

Many Google products originated as services provided by companies that Google has since acquired. For example, Google’s first acquisition was the Usenet company Deja News, and its services became Google Groups. Similarly, Google acquired Dodgeball, a social networking service company, and eventually replaced it with Google Latitude. Other acquisitions include web application company JotSpot, which became Google Sites; Voice over IP company GrandCentral, which became Google Voice; In 2004, Google acquired Keyhole, Inc. The start-up company developed a product called Earth Viewer that gave a three-dimensional view of the Earth which Google renamed to Google Earth in 2005 ;On April 13, 2007, Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, giving Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies; the famous Youtube itself as bought from 3 former Paypal employees for an amount of 1.65 billion dollars and most importantly the face of the company at the moment – ANDROID bought on August 17,2005 for an amount of 50 thousand dollars.

Also On June 5, 2012, Google announced it acquired Quickoffice, a company widely known for their mobile productivity suite for both iOS and Android. Google plans to integrate Quickoffice’s technology into its own product suite.

On February 6, 2013, Google announced it has acquired Channel Intelligencefor $125 million. Channel Intelligence, a technology company that helps customers buy products online, is active globally in 31 different countries and works with over 850 retailers. Google will use this technology to enhance its e-commerce business.

There is a comprehensive list of all mergers and acquisitions made by Google athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Google if one wishes to acquaint with all the 129(and counting) acquisitions made by Google.

Its funny how Google’s own unofficial slogan “Don’t be evil” seems to contradict itself. We use these google products one day or the other and think that “Wow, what a real deal Google is by providing us with so many productivity options”. But only few know what that real deal is. About how Google emerged as number ONE by employing competitive strategies and buying off the competitor.

Its only recent that The US Department of Justice has been urged to block the Latest Google’s $1.3bn acquisition of the traffic app Waze, on antitrust grounds. John Simpson, the privacy project director of Consumer Watchdog, a US pressure group, has written a letter to the DoJ warning that allowing the acquisition “would remove the most viable competitor to Google Maps in the mobile space”.

Simpson writes that “Google already dominates the online mapping business” and alleges that the company “was able to muscle its way to dominance by unfairly favouring its own services” ahead of competitors, through its power in the search business.

If the DoJ takes up the case, it would add to a growing number of antitrust investigations in progress against Google. In the US the Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the company has broken antitrust rules in its sales of online display ads, while in Europe its dominance of search is the target of a long-running European Commission investigation in which it has been told to revise its presentation of search results. Simpson has also asked the FTC to determine whether it should investigate the takeover.

Consumer Watchdog is concerned that Google and Waze will merge their operations, which “will allow Google access to even more data about online activity in a way that will increase its dominant position on the internet”. It pointed to the fact that the FTC’s approval of Google’s DoubleClick display business acquisition in 2008 “tipped Google to a search advertising monopoly” – which the FTC is now investigating.

The Google view of Waze acquisition – “Imagine if you could see real-time traffic updates from friends and fellow travelers ahead of you, calling out ‘fender bender…totally stuck in left lane! and showing faster routes that others are taking,” Google Geo Vice President Brian McClendon wrote in a blogpost.

On September 16, 2013, Bump Technologies announced that it was acquired by Google. On its official blog, Bump announced that its apps “Bump and Flock will continue to work as they always have for now”. The app allows you to select anything on your phone — photos, files — and transfer it to your computer simply by “bumping” the space bar of your laptop. And, vice versa, you can select just about anything on your computer, bump your space bar, and get it on your phone.

Google declined to say what it planned to do with Bump, issuing only this statement: “The Bump team has demonstrated a strong ability to quickly build and develop products that users love, and we think they’ll be a great fit at Google.”