Let us assume you are working on a Porters Five Forces Analysis of Google. Which of the following details from a Porters Five Forces analysis would be MORE ADVANTAGEOUS TO GOOGLE (We are assuming this detail is correct): MEDIUM STRENGTH FORCE: "Of course the competition is fierce among the industry leaders, but my personal opinion is that IBIS World and others overstate the level of competition. Microsoft for years was considered the evil empire, accused of anti-trust practices. The fact that the alliance between Bing and Yahoo! largely goes unnoticed is a testament to two things. First, competition is not as cut throat as some imagined. Secondly, Google has become so powerful that not even a merger between Yahoo! and Bing has people thinking monopoly." MEDIUM STRENGTH FORCE: "Advertising costs are determined in a real-time auction format, thus from the search engines perspective, there is no price setting. Both cost-per-click and paid inclusion 14 Google 10 methods of advertising involve bidding, so there is no way search providers can differentiate between customers. Nonetheless, suppliers like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! can offer different types of search placement. For example, one engine may allow you to bid on placement for searches including sports while another engine may allow you to bid on a more specialized keyword like world cup. For the most part, the industry has homogenized tools and platforms for advertising. Ultimately the power of the supplier depends on users. But given that there roughly four billion people in the world with access to the web, it does not feel like the user has much power." LOW STRENGTH OF FORCE: "As mentioned before, acquisitions are extremely high in this industry. For most startup tech companies the goal is to someday become acquired. Few companies manage to keep their autonomy while being relevant on a broad scale. The primary reason it is difficult to enter into the search engine industry is that searches require an enormous amount of capital develop, and also a variety of other offerings to secure web traffic. To compete on the same level as Google and Microsoft involves at minimum a distinct web browser, and more likely also an operating system and other software and hardware. Therefore, only one company seems to have the potential to enter the market in the foreseeable futureApple. Thanks to their success in the computer hardware and mobile industries, Apple has the platform to attract users for whatever search engines they might produce. However, as demonstrated by Apples recent disaster involving mobile maps, creating good tools to support good web searching is clearly difficult. One other potential entrant is Facebook. Their social platform has the necessary base of supporters and advertisers, but a strong search engine is still in the distant future. Also, their success presupposes that Facebook endures in social media, which is quite uncertain."