Founded in 1998 as an internet search engine, Google’s mission statement remains the same to this day: to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google is certainly successful, with revenues growing from $3.2 billion in 2002 to $74.5 billion in 2015, 90 percent of which comes from advertisers. Google is expanding rapidly into other areas well beyond its search engine, such as self-driving cars, smart contact lenses that measure a person’s blood sugar levels, internet-bearing balloons to create internet hotspots anywhere on earth, and even magnetic nanoparticles to search for disease within the human bloodstream. In fact, Google has innovated into so many diverse new ventures that it recently created a broader organization—a parent holding company called Alphabet—to contain them all. Google/Alphabet has been in a buying frenzy recently, purchasing security, biotech, and robotic companies in a quest to capitalize on the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon. Experts predict there will be 25 million connected devices in our homes and workplaces by 2020. Google recently announced its new IoT operating system, dubbed Brillo (after the Brillo scrubbing pad because it is a scrubbed-down version of its Android operating system), targeted to developers of smart products connected to the internet, such as ovens, thermostats, and even toothbrushes. It’s also developed Weave, the corresponding IoT language that will allow smart products to speak to each other. Perhaps one day you will be sitting in your Google/Alphabet self-driving car, streaming the news, checking your blood sugar, and cooling your home by turning down your thermostat on the way home from work.
Questions
1. Conduct research on Google/Alphabet to learn more about its products and services. Some say the time has come for Google to create a new mission statement. Do you
agree? Explain.
2. Create a new mission statement for Google/Alphabet that will take it through the rest of this century.