Highly educated customers are among its main target customer base who make heavy use of the internet for search or media consumption. Overall, the core users of Google products lie mainly in the age group. These include the students and professionals mainly. To grow its user base globally, Google has continued to expand its product line. Starting from the search engine, Google has vastly expanded its product portfolio.
Apart from the chrome browser and the Gmail and its advertising business, the company has added several more apps and services. Some of these were built in-house, whereas the others were acquired from outside. Its acquisition of the Android operating system proved to be great in expanding the presence of the brand across the mobile segment. Google Play houses millions of apps and generates a sizable revenue for the company each year. The tech giant is already the third-largest player in the cloud industry and expects faster growth in the near term.
Despite a much lower annual revenue run rate than the two largest firms in the cloud industry — Amazon and Microsoft — Google has been able to win some massive deals, which indicate its strengthening clout in the cloud sector. Its revenue from YouTube ads has also grown. It is ahead of Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft in search advertising. In the longer term, too, the company can continue to find growth by introducing new small and large apps and services.
It is among the most innovative tech firms globally and one of the leading spenders on research and development, where Amazon leads the entire industry. The level of competition in the tech industry has continued to intensify, and all the tech leaders are investing aggressively in research and development. These are the main technologies driving sweeping changes industrywide.
Apart from the higher competition in the tech industry, there are other factors, too, like the focus on user experience and the demand for high-quality products and services that are making brands like Google devote more resources to research and development. So, the company has made technological innovation a central pillar of its business strategy. The mobile segment of consumers is now attracting more focus of the tech brands. As the internet and smartphone usage has continued to climb worldwide, more and more users are found online from their mobile devices.
Whether it is for online shopping, entertainment, or social media, people stick to their mobile phone screens longer than ever. Google has a strong presence in the mobile segment, mainly because of its Android operating system used on the largest number of smartphones worldwide. Google is consistently growing its focus on mobile users since they are now the largest part of its consumer base.
Apart from its digital assistant , Google also introduced several more apps like its Photo app to drive higher Google Products usage on smartphones. The number of smartphone users is expected to reach 3.
This denotes a sizable increase in the user base of mobile apps and can be highly profitable for Google in terms of mobile advertising and sales of apps on Google Play. According to Statscounter , Android enjoys around However, over time, the company has also continued to diversify its revenue sources by acquiring new businesses or creating new channels of growth.
As already discussed, the company follows the strategy of building or acquiring to grow its user base and diversification. These are also among its leading products and services. However, they have still helped the company secure its position in the industry.
The second was that digital downloads were rapidly eating into the market for DVDs. It would have been better off making an exclusive commitment earlier—in exchange for a sufficiently large payment to compensate for the risk of guessing wrong about who the ultimate winner would be. Given all the previous occasions when delays in resolving standards wars had opened the gate for new technologies to leapfrog existing ones, Time Warner should have known better.
In choosing how to play on a given platform, companies must keep two main questions in mind: How can we differentiate ourselves from competitors that are conducting business on the same platform?
And how can we reduce or mitigate the risk of holdup once we have decided to play? For example, after a company has decided to place online ads through Google, the only remaining choices are how much to spend and which keywords to bid on. But in some cases, even a nonstrategic player can make choices that will differentiate it from competitors and avoid contract options that could commoditize its business.
When Google announced in that it was going to launch OpenSocial, a new platform for developing applications that would work on all social network websites that joined it, LinkedIn had to decide whether it should play with Google and, if so, how. The decision to play was relatively easy.
LinkedIn, as the third-largest social network behind MySpace and Facebook, needed to extend its reach and potentially lower its costs in order to compete. The critical question was, how to play? Recognizing these dangers, LinkedIn crafted a strategy that would exploit the advantages of the platform but mitigate most of the risks.
It decided to build its own platform and invite third-party application developers to join. In addition, it decided it would not allow all applications developed for OpenSocial members to work on LinkedIn.
It would continue to offer proprietary applications and would use OpenSocial to increase their value. For example, it added to its proprietary calendar application an OpenSocial feature that allows a LinkedIn member to find out who else from LinkedIn and other networks is attending an event. Though it was a nonstrategic player in the space, LinkedIn consciously took steps to avoid becoming trapped in a commodity world, by mixing and matching the advantages of the MSP with its own products.
Strategic players have more options. They can either order from the menu or use their power to obtain a custom deal. Microsoft had required that game companies use its proprietary tools in developing their online games, include standardized features such as voice chat and Gamertags unique user names , and allow Microsoft to handle customer service, billing, and administration.
EA feared that those terms would cede too much control of the user relationship to Microsoft and would level the playing field among game developers.
It also worried that it would set a bad precedent, encouraging Microsoft to make even more onerous demands in the future. Consequently, it refused to go along. To put pressure on Microsoft, EA included online functionality in the versions of the games it made for the Sony PlayStation 2, but not for the Xbox versions. Recognizing that this put Xbox Live at a severe disadvantage, Microsoft caved. It allowed EA to maintain control over its own user data, marketing, and billing and reportedly also agreed to give EA financial compensation.
The biggest mistake you can make when deciding how to play is granting preferential terms to an MSP without carefully analyzing how the terms will affect the balance of power, both now and in the future. This has been a painful lesson for the music studios in their relationship with Apple and iTunes. To contain the mortal threat posed by Napster and other file-sharing services, the studios hastily jumped on the iTunes platform in As a result, iTunes became the dominant platform for digital music, the studios found themselves dependent on it, and Apple has been able to extract most of the value of the business—mainly by keeping all the proceeds of its highly profitable iPod sales for itself.
The studios should have considered the long-term implications of their decision to join iTunes more carefully and tried to negotiate more advantageous terms from the outset. Playing with multisided platforms soon will be a fact of life for all companies, big and small. MSPs reduce search and transaction costs and give companies vastly broader access to markets than they could achieve on their own.
So resist the herd mentality. Think twice before you join a popular platform. And remember that MSPs are moving targets and regularly review your strategy. The Google of tomorrow is unlikely to be the same platform as the Google of today. Until the iPhone was invented, most cell phone companies were players on the platforms of cellular networks.
In the last two years, first the iPhone and then a slew of other cell phone manufacturers have rushed to turn themselves into the next-generation platform. Players should be on the lookout for opportunities to become the tail that wags the dog.
If you play really well on an MSP, you may even be able to dictate the rules of the game. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month. Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. The power of intermediaries like Google, Amazon, and Blu-ray is rapidly growing.
Be prepared. Reprint: RF Multisided platforms can lower your transaction costs and increase customer reach. To select the right MSP for your business, consider three crucial decisions: Should you use an existing MSP or build your own platform? Should your company partner with one MSP or many? For instance, many companies advertise on both Google and Yahoo! Which MSP features should you adopt—or reject—to maintain competitive advantage? Watch out for these moves: Imposing price increases once the MSP becomes successful.
Google has been bundling more applications into its core offerings. Weakening your relationship with your customers. No thanks I don't want to stay up to date. Insight from SEO experts, Edit , has delved into what future trends lie ahead across Google with AI dominating and beyond in its importance for business with new projects in the pipeline to improve the way we do business. Google is learning and improving faster than we can comprehend and that is being translated to the latest technology available to businesses.
As Google becomes better at interpreting and inferring information from things other than just text, businesses will need to recognise that AI will be analysing everything they do with greater efficiency and larger datasets than rivals will have done before. This obviously goes beyond Google. Some businesses are already harnessing AI — even in its most basic forms of machine learning — to transform the level of insights they can glean from their customers, sales, operating efficiencies and all manner of other data sources.
Done correctly, this can lead not only to greater efficiencies, but also greater effectiveness of what we produce, market and sell, by targeting customers better and answering their needs. Machine learning is becoming the phrase that data scientists hide from CVs, putting a data science model into production is the biggest data challenge, and companies are still not getting it.
We spoke to a data expert on the state of data science, and why machine learning is a more appropriate phrase than AI. Read here. For the first time, Google could match words to concepts and figure out what a user wanted from a looser search.
Google is definitely, absolutely committed to AI. Larry Page is committed, and it is viable in both short-term, by being able to out-analyse competition, and the long-term, the consequences of being the first creator of anything resembling true AI is vast. For many businesses it should be about two things which you should probably be doing anyway: be consistent in your communications, and make sure you use clean, structured data.
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