ALPHABET INC. BLUE OCEAN SUCCESS
Alphabet Inc. is an American
multinational conglomerate headquartered in Mountain View, California.
It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and
became the parent company of Google and several former Google
subsidiaries. The two founders of Google assumed executive roles in the
new company, with Larry Page serving as CEO and Sergey Brin as
president. Alphabet is the world's fourth-largest technology company by
revenue and one of the world's most valuable companies. On 16 January,
2020, Alphabet Inc. reached the market cap of $ 1 trillion. In addition
to the creation of holding company and restructuring, Alphabet's
historic success lies in a series of blue ocean's created within Google.
AdWords, AdSense, Youtube, Gmail, Google Maps have been the blue oceans
which put Google on path of one of the most glorious successes in
corporate history.
Google - A Blue Ocean Strategy Journey
By 1M Marketing - October 28, 2012
Simply put, Blue Ocean Strategy refers to competing in an uncontested
market space (in contrast to red ocean that is bloodied by fighting
competitors). This gives the adopter an advantage in terms of profit and
growth for a time period limited only by the resources and capabilities
of its copying competitors, if any at all.
By observing Google closely, one will find its mastery over the
formulation and implementation of Blue Ocean Strategy. Starting from its
search engine to latest projects of driver-less cars and hiking trail
mapping, it is putting it steps in paths that no one trod before. We all
know its superb search engine that is hard to beat. We also know about
its driver-less cars (click here). Most of you are probably aware of
Google Maps. The latest one that would be hard to beat is the unfolding
map of wilds and trails- for hiking, biking, running, 360 touring of
historical places - what not?
They already have developed a set of 40lb equipment called "trekker"
that would be backpacked by Google people to have 360-views of hiking
and biking trails around the world. These shots would be transformed
into a series of continuous pictures resulting in a virtual complete
view for hikers, bikers and tourists to see online. There is no surprise
that, starting its "Street View" feature in 2007 covering about five
cities in USA only, it now stands at 3000+ cities in 43 countries as of
2012!
It seems like Google has mastered the Blue Ocean Strategy. We will be
waiting to see the next surprise from Google. What do you think it would
look like?
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Google's Blue Ocean Strategy
Analysis Case Study
Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin named the search engine they built
"Google," a play on the word "googol," the mathematical term for a 1
followed by 100 zeros. The name reflects the immense volume of
information that exists, and the scope of Google's mission: to organize
the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
If Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) had optimized expenses in the quarter ended
June 30, 2008 the company would have earned $6.3 billion. Its actual
earnings were $4.0 billion. Management threw $2.3 billion down the drain
by over spending on everything in its competition with Google (NYSE:
GOOG). That's because Microsoft may have been born in a blue ocean, but
now the company is living in a red one. According to the latest
Interbrand report published in Business Week, Microsoft is the second
most valuable brand on the planet. Google, incorporated in 1998, is
number 20 on the list. Both of these companies were born in a "blue
ocean" of their own creation. But today Microsoft, at 32 years old,
already is long in the tooth for an IT company. Management now must
survive in a sea of "Red Ocean" expenses. Hounded on all sides by Google
as well as newer upstarts.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met in 1995. By 1998 these
top two students in their class at Stanford had bought a terabyte of
storage at discount prices and built their first data centre in a dorm
room. Come December of the same year, they moved operations into a
garage and were answering 10,000 search queries per day. There was no
turning back after that and by June 2000 they had the largest search
index while handling 100 million queries per day.
Google mainly implements the Four Action Framework of Blue Ocean
Strategy.
Eliminated
Google eliminated configuration options for regular users. Google
eliminated the search configuration paradigm, removing the need for
users to preselect the Boolean filters AND/OR/NOT (dropdown menus and
radio buttons). Simplicity of
search interface was a raging battle at search engine companies for
years until Google cleared the noise. However, many website search
interfaces are obsessed with letting user's fail with Boolean filtering.
Reduced
Google have dramatically reduced the clutter: both the visual clutter of
other "portals" and the not-so-valuable stuff it represents. Google
Wave, a new "conversation" type service that Google is hoping to
reinvent e-mail, IM and group conversations - with the help of
developers at the event. The product won't be released to the public
until later this year but it's more than just a product. The company is
calling it an open source platform that developers can build on, just as
they did for products like Google Maps. It starts off like an email
between two people but quickly becomes more. It allows users to post
"replies" to parts of the email - for example, the questions at the top
of the sender's message about weekend adventures and again further down
to confirm next week's meeting location. In normal e-mail messages, it
would take a dozen or more back and forth emails between the two people
- and exponentially more messages as other people get added to the
conversation - to have the same conversations.
One cool feature the company showed off was the ability to "playback"
the message - to show how it evolved - for people who were added to the
conversation late. The service also incorporates well with other sites,
such as blogging services and photo albums and includes some
robotic-like features, such as adding a bot user called Bloggee, which
takes the conversation or the images attached (with a cool drag and drop
feature) and populate a blog post with it. It even becomes, via
extensions, a third-party Twitter app.
Raised
Google have dramatically raised ease of use. Simplicity fuels many
elements of good design, including ease of use, speed, visual appeal,
and accessibility. But simplicity starts with the design of a product's
fundamental functions.
Google doesn't set out to create feature-rich products; the best designs
include only the features that people need to accomplish their goals.
Ideally, even products that require large feature sets and complex
visual designs appear to be simple as well as powerful. Google teams
think twice before sacrificing simplicity in pursuit of a less important
feature. The hope is to evolve products in new directions instead of
just adding more features. Good design can go a long way to earn the
trust of the people who use Google products. Establishing Google's
reliability starts with the basics - for example, making sure the
interface is efficient and professional, actions are easily reversed,
ads are clearly identified, terminology is consistent, and users are
never unhappily surprised. A greater challenge is to make sure that
Google demonstrates respect for users' right to control their own data.
Google is transparent about how it uses information and how that
information is shared with others (if at all), so that users can make
informed choices. The products warn users about such dangers as insecure
connections, actions that may make users vulnerable to spam, or the
possibility that data shared outside Google may be stored elsewhere. The
larger Google becomes, the more essential it is to live up to the "Don't
be evil" motto.
Created
Google created Page Rank: the magic algorithm that seems to read your
mind and return relevant results. Google's Page Rank algorithm assesses
the importance of web pages without human evaluation of the content. In
fact, Google feels that the value of its service is largely in its
ability to provide unbiased results to search queries; Google claims,
"the heart of our software is Page Rank." It's no secret anymore that
Google ranks as the number one defacto-standard in the field of major
search engines. Today, Google accounts for more than 85 percent of all
Internet searches on a daily basis.
Google now has many versions running in many different countries,
including China, Japan, the U.K., Hong-Kong and many others The Google
Toolbar's Page Rank feature displays a visited page's Page Rank as a
whole number between 0 and 10. The most popular websites have a Page
Rank of 10. The least have a Page Rank of 0.
The Google Directory Page Rank is an 8-unit measurement. These values
can be viewed in the Google Directory. The Google Page Rank value relies
on the uniquely democratic nature of the Internet by using its vast
global link structure as a prime indicator of an individual page's
value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a
vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer
volume of votes, or links a page receives. It also analyzes the page
that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important
or are favorably viewed as "established firms" in the Web community
weigh more heavily and help to make other pages look established too. A
Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality
websites with information relevant to users searching specific products,
services or information on a particular subject. The following diagram
shows overview of Google search engine in blue ocean dashboard. Google
is shown as in the blue ocean dashboard in Figure #5. This dashboard was
created by Dr. Rod King, who claims that it can comprehensively manage
the performance of any business model. The Figure #4 shows the general
information in the Dashboard.
(Click on Image for Enlarged View)
The Figure shows the blue ocean map for
Google's Search Engine. The blue ocean map contains a plot of Revenue
v/s No. of Competitors. The blue ocean map shows the following things:
1. Shows the contested and uncontested marketplaces.
2. Illustrates the concept of "Ideal Blue Ocean", where the competition
is irrelevant.
3. Indicates that there are more than two types of ocean in a
marketplace.
4. Shows the best part of journey towards a blue ocean.
(Click on Image for Enlarged View)