1. Explain how Google’s strategy has been developed over the years.
2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of its approach?

3. In what ways should Google’s approach to strategy development change in the future?

Google is one of the few companies whose main product’s name became so synonymous with its primary offering that it has become a commonly used verb. Google, which was renamed Alphabet in October 2015, had a market capitalisation of $725bn (£435bn, €544bn) by 2016. With a network of over one million computers worldwide, it was the dominant player in internet search globally (85 per cent market share, way ahead of former giant Yahoo’s six per cent and Microsoft’s ‘Bing’ and Chinese Baidu, both with three per cent). Google’s internet search- related advertising accounted for 86 per cent of Alphabet’s revenues. However, the giant’s expansion faced some challenges. People moved to mobiles with lower-priced ads, which limited growth. In contrast to expectations, the YouTube video service was also unable to produce profits. Finally, the company was slowly but surely closing down Google +, its big bet on social networking services. In addition, there were questions concerning the restructuring of Google and renaming it Alphabet; 1 intended as a holding company including the Google search business and an increasingly diversified portfolio.

About Google

Google started life as the brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were students at Stanford University in the USA. When Page and Brin launched their own search engine product, it gained followers and users quickly, attracted financial backing and enabled them to launch their IPO to the US stock market in 2004 raising a massive $1.67bn.

From the beginning Google was different. Instead of using investment banks as dictators of the initial share price for the IPO, they launched a kind of open IPO auction with buyers deciding on the fair price for a share. Page sent an open letter to shareholders explaining that Google was not a conventional company and did not intend to become one; it was about breaking the mould. This continued as Google set up a two-tier board of directors, a model which, though common in some European countries (e.g. the Netherlands), is rare in the USA. The advantage for Page and Brin was the additional distance it placed between them and their shareholders and the increased managerial freedom it offered to them to run their company their way.

Page and Brin also recruited successful CEO Eric Schmidt from Novell Inc. and, between the three of them, shared power at the top. Schmidt dealt with administration and Google’s investors and had the most traditional CEO role. Page was centrally concerned with the social structure of Google while Brin took a lead in the area of ethics. how it was

It could be difficult to work out who was responsible for what inside Google plex (Google’s HQ) in Mountain View, California. There was a famously unstructured style of operating; Eric Schmidt claimed that their strategy was based on trial and error:……………….