Google and its competitive advantage.

Google:                                      

Google /ɡuːɡ(ə)l/ is an American multinational organization specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search cloud computing, and software.^[7] Most of its profits are derived from AdWords

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Early History

Beginning

Google began in March 1998 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford University.

In search of a dissertation theme, Page had been considering—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.^[3] His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got"^[4]) and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, based on the consideration that the number and nature of such backlinks was valuable information.

In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", Page was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page serving as the only starting point.

Google's Big Three Competitive Advantages

Google, because of its size, innovation, and market position, has a number of competitive advantages. While Google has many competitive advantages, it possible to narrow Google’s competitive advantages into three main categories consisting of infrastructure, innovative services, and market share. First, Google has an incredibly powerful infrastructure is not easily replicated. Just like walmart is known for having highly efficient supply chain infrastructure with a massive investment in plant assets and equipment including transport vehicles, enormous warehouse facilities, and high tech inventory systems, Google has a vast technology infrastructure.

Technology Infrastructure :

Google does not disclose the number of data centers or servers they operate, but based on energy usage, the dollar amount of Google’s capital expenditures, and other factors, estimates can be made on the size and efficiency of Google’s infrastructure.According to information provided by Google on their data centers page, most of their locations cost between $300-600 million to build and equip (Google). A 2011 article from Data Center Knowledge reported that Google was probably using somewhere around 900,000 servers. If went on further to note that, despite Google’s massive operations which use .01% of the entire world’s electricity, Google’s data center’s are incredibly efficient as they use less than 1% of the power used by data centers worldwide (Miller, 2011).

Google’s services would not be possible without their infrastructure which makes it very hard for competitors to copy or even try to rival Google. This makes Google’s infrastructure a sustainable competitive advantage.

Innovative Services

The next competitive advantage that Google boasts is all of its innovative services. While the case lists 40 different Google services, a Wikipedia article lists well of 100 Google services including the renown “Google Search,” Gmail, Blogger, Google Finance, Google Docs, Google Apps, Adsense, and Google Chrome, just to mention a few. While many of these services were developed in-house, Google has also greatly expanded its services through acquisitions, with YouTube, being a classic example.

The incredible value of Google’s services lies in the fact that Google can offer nearly all of their services at zero cost to web users. Because of the number of services and users, Google is able to offer an attractive advertising model and make billions of dollars every year. Because of its infrastructure, Google is able to offer an incredible range of services. While similar services may be used by competitors, Google gives its users the chance to enjoy a “one-stop-shop” for all their Internet and computing needs. This is a hard advantage for competitors to overcome, however, Google must continue to innovate in order to make this advantage sustainable.

Google in the Mobile Market

Market Share

Google’s last major competitive advantage is market share. Comscore, a well known leader in technology monitoring, issues monthly reports on market share for a number of digital services. The results from Comscore’s search engine rankings and market share reports are almost always published through major media outlets such as Reuters or Bloomberg. According to Comscore’s March 2012 report, Google Search currently holds 66.4% of the market share in Internet searching (2012). Google’s closest competitor is Microsoft with 15.3%. Google has held this strong majority of search market share for quite some time. The January 2010 report from Comscore listed Google at 65.4%, with Yahoo!, the next closest competitor, at 17.0% (2010). Clearly, Google has a significant foothold in the search industry, but that is not the only service in which Google leads the way in market share.
Comscore’s February report for US mobile subscriber market share revealed Google has having 50.1% of market, nearly 20 percentage points above Apple who had 30.2% of the market (com Score, 2012). Unlike Google Search, which has historically dominated the market, just two years ago in January 2010 Google only had 7.1% market share in mobile phones while Research in Motion lead the industry with 43.0% (com-score, 2010). This proves that Google can preserve market share in one industry while having the ability to gain a huge market share in a completely different market.

These three competitive advantages place Google in a very strong position for the future. A recent article featured on Seeking Alpha, an investment website, argued that Google stock is likely to increase $140 in the next year (ValueMax, 2012). 

Google Glass :

Google Glass is a type of Wearable technology with an optical head-mounted display (OHMD). It was developed by Google with the mission of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer.^[1] Google Glass displays information in a smartphone- like hands-free format. Wearers communicate with the Internet via natural language voice commands.^[11][12] Google started selling Google Glass to qualified "Glass Explorers" in the US on April 15, 2013 for a limited period for $1,500, before it became available to the public on May 15, 2014 ^[13] for the same price.

Features :

Loïc Le Meur controls Google Glass using the touchpad built into the side of the device

• Touch pad: A touchpad is located on the side of Google Glass, allowing users to control the device by swiping through a timeline-like interface displayed on the screen Sliding backward shows current events, such as weather, and sliding forward shows past events, such as phone calls, photos, circle updates, etc.
• Camera: Google Glass has the ability to take photos and record 720p HD video.
• Display: The Explorer version of Google Glass uses a Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS), field-sequential color, LED illuminated display.The display's LED illumination is first P-polarized and then shines through the in-coupling polarizing beam splitter (PBS) to the LCoS panel. The panel reflects the light and alters it to S-polarization at active pixel sites. The in-coupling PBS then reflects the S-polarized areas of light at 45° through the out-coupling beam splitter to a collimating reflector at the other end. Finally, the out-coupling beam splitter (which is a partially reflecting mirror, not a polarizing beam splitter) reflects the collimated light another 45° and into the wearer's eye.

Here goes an interesting video on the GOOGLE GLASS :

Here are some comparing features among Yahoo, Google and Msn Search :

Yahoo!

• been in the search game for many years.
• is better than MSN but nowhere near as good as Google at determining if a link is a natural citation or not.
• has a ton of internal content and a paid inclusion program. both of which give them incentive to bias search results toward commercial results
• things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in Yahoo!

MSN Search

• new to the search game
• is bad at determining if a link is natural or artificial in nature
• due to sucking at link analysis they place too much weight on the page content
• their poor relevancy algorithms cause a heavy bias toward commercial results
• likes bursty recent links
• new sites that are generally untrusted in other systems can rank quickly in MSN Search
• things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in MSN Search

Google

• has been in the search game a long time, and saw the web graph when it is much cleaner than the current web graph
• is much better than the other engines at determining if a link is a true editorial citation or an artificial link
• looks for natural link growth over time
• heavily biases search results toward informational resources
• trusts old sites way too much
• a page on a site or subdomain of a site with significant age or link related trust can rank much better than it should, even with no external citations
• they have aggressive duplicate content filters that filter out many pages with similar content
• if a page is obviously focused on a term they may filter the document out for that term. on page variation and link anchor text variation are important. a page with a single reference or a few references of a modifier will frequently outrank pages that are heavily focused on a search phrase containing that modifier
• crawl depth determined not only by link quantity, but also link quality. Excessive low quality links may make your site less likely to be crawled deep or even included in the index.
• things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links are generally ineffective in Google when you consider the associated opportunity cost

Beyond all the comparisons one of the most innovating and inspiring interns are given by Google. Lets have a watch on the experience of the interns of Google:

Sources :
https://www.youtube.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass#Features
http://www.seobook.com/relevancy/
http://jasonmatthews.hubpages.com/hub/What-are-Googles-Competative-Advantages