Google Strategy Case Study 2011

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Google Case Study: Google’s Strategy in 2011 Question 1: Discuss competition in the search industry. Which of the five competitive forces seem strongest? Weakest? What is your assessment of overall industry attractiveness? Search engine industry has channelled the attention of millions globally, and besides being a search engine, it earns its revenue from advertising (Evans, 2007). Google has been able to maintain its competitive advantage among its competitors, due to its ability of sustaining its interaction with its consumers from various fields. Based on understanding, its five competitors, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, AOL and others offer relatively the same service. Porter’s Five Forces analysis can be used to unveil the competition aggressiveness. 1. Threat of New Entrant Though the barrier to entry is relatively low, Google has built strong partnership ties with advertisers, internet users and websites. Both Google and its competitors are already at their maturity and technologically advanced stage, thus making it very challenging for new entrants to compete. New entrants must provide superior service to make an impact, which is difficult to achieve as the big players have the best of the technology and a lot of know-how. 2. Threat of Substitute Products Competitors like Yahoo and Bing can be considered substitute for Google in context of a search engine, whereas Facebook and Twitter could be a substitute in the field of advertising. However, there are no considerably better product that can substitute the search engine industry. Search engine has a very fast turnover of results in a matter of seconds in comparison to physical references. With the availability of the internet connection, online search engines can be accessed anywhere and hence the threat is relatively moderate. 3. Bargaining Power of Buyers
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