2.9 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. (AACSB: Communication; Reflective thinking)

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 €2.8 billion in 2002 to €100 billion in 2017, 90 per cent 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 organisation – a parent holding company called Alphabet – to contain them all. Google/Alphabet has been on a buying frenzy recently, purchasing security, biotech and robotic companies in a quest to capitalise on the Internet of Things (IoT)
phenomenon. Experts predict there will be 25 million connected devices in our homes and workplaces by 2020.