From smart phones to maps to e-mail to search, today Google is everywhere. This ubiquity makes it easy to forget that the company was founded in 1998 by two Stanford University PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They named the company Google as a play on “googol,” the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeroes. The name expressed the duo’s ambition to help users sift through the nearly limitless amounts of information on the internet. Page and Brin further elucidated their goals in Google’s corporate mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” To this end, they started by focusing their energy on the nascent field of internet search. The result of their effort was the PageRank algorithm, which counted the number and quality of links to a given website to rate its relevance and importance. This algorithm proved to be far superior to those used at the time by competing search engines such as Yahoo, and Google quickly became the dominant company in Web search.......

Questions

1. What is Google’s core business? What are the pros and cons of managing a diverse portfolio of businesses?

2. With a portfolio as diverse as Google’s, what are the company’s core brand values?

3. What’s next for Google? Where should the company focus its resources?