Google Strategy Case Study
Key Learning Outcomes
By the end of the case, students should be able to:
- Understand the broad macro-environment of Google and the online search engine industry in terms of political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal factors (PESTEL/PEST/STEEPLE).
- Use our swot analysis example to gain an overall understanding of Google's strengths and weaknesses and strategic options arising from the opportunities and threats that have been identified from the Pestle analysis example on it's business environment.
- To apply strategy business models and frameworks such as Pestle/Pest/Steeple, Swot etc to real company cases.
Analyze the external and internal environment of Google using Pestel and Swot
- See also, Google Porters Five Forces 2019
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Google Inc. is an American search engine founded by Sergey and Larry Page in 1998. It is currently a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc which currently controls a diverse range of businesses including YouTube, Dialogflow, AdMob, Google Japan, Android and Google environment among others. Google offers more than 50 internet services including Gmail (email), GoogleDocs (online document creation), GoogleDrive (cloud storage) and Android (software for mobile phones, tablets, and computers).
With more than 86.2% of the global online search market, Google has become the biggest search engine in the world operating in 219 countries globally, ahead of competitors Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu with 6.55%, 3.27%, and 1.08% respectively as of 2018 (Statista 2018).
Google has been growing from strength to strength, with its revenue growing from $74.54 bn in 2015 to $109.65billion in 2017 (Statista 2017) with advertising being the biggest contributor to the overall revenue as figure 1 (below) shows;
Figure 1: Google’s global revenue from 2002 to 2017 (in billion US dollars)
Source: Statista