Google

External environment

Political issue

Google is one of the biggest Information Technology companies in the world. Google is an American public corporation, specializing in Internet searching and online advertising. Google is rapidly growing in popularity around the worldwide. Google justifies its vast new range of services by explaining they all still fit the original company mission statement, to "organize the world's information." Therefore the most important thing is that political remain stable is very important for Google doing business in those countries. Nowadays, world’s political situation remains constantly especially for those developed countries such as U.S, EU and also including some developing counties like China and India. Google expanding its business smoothly in those counties under true and fair condition. Although Google has been criticizing by doing censorship in certain counties, Google still reported revenues of $3.66 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2007. Opportunities of Google can be expanding very fast in worldwide since global political situation remains stable. Threats of Google can be losing their market share and revenues rapidly when political situation become worse.

Economic issue

U.S IT spending in the next 12 months to hit only 4.6%. Economists say the economy won't take any drastic downturn -- instead they see this as a modest "mid-cycle correction." While the global economy will experience a largely U.S.-led "mid-cycle correction" over the next year, the risks of a more problematic downturn are still low. While world growth is set to slow, after three years of above trend growth, the expected mild deceleration is probably not going to develop into anything worse. Despite recent upward movements, inflation in most parts of the world is still quite low by historical standards, and will remain under control -- even as oil prices remain high. Moreover, while central banks have been tightening, interest rates are still relatively modest, when compared with levels of the last two decades.

Opportunities of Google can share huge market share since IT spending continuous growing constantly in U.S market and inflation will not affect Google’s revenue significantly. Threat of Google can be high competition may arise since market going to mind-cycle correction period.

Social issue

Nowadays, people changing their life style frequently base on the information they received. Google is the most popular search engine for researching and/or purchasing Entertainment products, services or information online вЂ"used by 83% of all respondents. The vast majority (89%) of Google users have used the web to learn more about an Entertainment product, service, or information. The vast majority (86%) of Google users who use websites to learn about Movies, use a search engine to find those movie sites. 79% Google users say search engines are very important for researching/purchasing movies and related information.

Opportunities of Google are that Google can influence people living style easily, which can increase their advertising sales and their public image. Google can compete with competitors such as YAHOO, BAIDU and Microsoft Research via using its strong customer database. Threat of Google will be competitors become partner to against Google. Google may criticize by those organizations or individuals, who allege protect the IP right on Internet.

Technological issue

The Web is growing much faster than any present-technology search engine can possibly index. In 2006, some users found major search-engines became slower to index new WebPages. Many WebPages are updated frequently, which forces the search engine to revisit them periodically. The queries one can make are currently limited to searching for key words, which may result in many false positives, especially using the default whole-page search. Better results might be achieved by using a proximity-search option with a search-bracket to limit matches within a paragraph or phrase, rather than matching random words scattered across large pages. Another alternative is using human operators to do the researching for the user with organic search engines. Opportunity of Google is that Google solve those questions above and become the market leader of Internet research engine. Threat of Google can be competitors of Google solved the problems before Google. As the result, Google may lose their customer to the competitors.

Industry environments

Porter’s five forces

Rivalry

Google faces formidable competition in every aspect of their business, and particularly from other companies that seek to connect people with information on the web and provide them with relevant advertising. Currently, Google consider their primary competitors to be Microsoft Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. Microsoft has developed features that make web search a more integrated part of its Windows operating system and other desktop software products. Google expects that Microsoft will increasingly use its financial and engineering resources to compete with Google and Microsoft has more employees and cash resources than Google does. Also, both Microsoft and Yahoo have longer operating histories and more established relationships with customers and end users. They can use their experience and resources against Google in a variety of competitive ways, including by making acquisitions, investing more aggressively in research and development and competing more aggressively for advertisers and web sites. Microsoft and Yahoo also may have a greater ability to attract and retain users than Google does because they operate Internet portals with a broad range of content products and services. If Microsoft or Yahoo are successful in providing similar or better web search results, more relevant advertisements or in leveraging their platforms or products to make their web search or advertiser services easier to access, Google could experience a significant decline in user traffic or in the size of the Google Network. Any such decline could negatively affect Google's revenues.