Google

Google is a US company that has decided to pursue operations overseas and would present an excellent case study in deciding whether a company can benefit from international business.

Google was founded by two University of Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their main objective of founding the company was to be able to retrieve specific data from massive amounts of information. The two developed a proprietary technology that would become the ultimate search engine. Initially the pair worked out of their dorm room, then a garage, and once they had quickly outgrown these "facilities" they had moved on to a much larger facility where they reside to this day. It seemed to be a matter of time before they had conquered the continental United States, and had begun to eye the lands across the pond.

As the internet increases its grasp on foreign markets, it was a natural progression for one of the most successful companies to be born from the internet to expand its operations into these fledgling countries. While the internet usage in foreign markets such as Japan, Europe, and China are just beginning to take shape, the number of new internet users in these markets is expanding at a much greater rate than in the United States.

Google, which generates almost all of its revenue from advertising sales, have focused their attentions to these markets with unlimited potential. Google executives anticipate as its presence in foreign countries expands so will the growth of the company and eventually the bottom line. Some of the latest data on Google's financial status is that it receives a little less than two-thirds of all revenue domestically. This data is slated to change dramatically as overseas operations grow. One of the factors that have allowed Google to experience such successful growth is that the popularity of the brand was dispersed through word of mouth rather than expensive advertising dollars. With the populations in foreign markets much larger than in the Unites States it looks like a formula for success. However, what has been a formula for success in the United States does not always translate to success in other parts of the world.

Part of Google's plan to assist internet users in finding vast amounts of data instantly was to digitize library collections from the best libraries in the U.S. This has created sort of a backlash in the European markets, in that government officials are concerned that the majority of the information that will be transmitted will be written only in English from an American's point of view without understanding the differences in culture. Inadvertently, Google has created a potential adversary to the king of information on the internet. These government and other officials have plans to publish foreign collections from the view point of Europeans on the internet. Google has conducted itself from inception with great care and foresight and is continuing to do so. Google defended itself against allegations of trying to promote American culture at the cost of other cultures by stating much of the books that are being digitized have been written by foreign authors in their native tongues. They have also stated that they are very involved with the institutions that are providing the material, and are very open to making arrangements with institutions abroad to provide the