Influencing Organisational Strategy: Google's Strategic Decisions

This report analyzes Google's corporate strategy, exploring its evolution, diversification of products and services, and the strategic decisions that have shaped its trajectory. It delves into Google's vision for the future, examining its ability to adapt to the changing business landscape and maintain its competitive edge. The report investigates Google's diversification strategies, including its expansion into various sectors like mobile phones, web browsers, and social networking, and assesses the impact of these moves on its market position. Furthermore, it examines the establishment of Alphabet Inc. and its influence on Google's strategic decision-making processes. The report also discusses the factors that influence Google's strategies and its approach to complex and ambiguous strategic decisions. The report concludes with an overview of the key findings and insights regarding Google's corporate strategy and future direction.

Running head: INFLUENCING ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY
Influencing Organisational Strategy
Name of Student:
Name of University:
Author’s Note:

1INFLUENCING ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY
Abstract:
The aim of this report is to answer certain questions related to the corporate strategy of
the Google Company. It also aim to discuss whether Google has a clear vision for the future and
also explore the diversification of Google’s products and services. The need of Google to refocus
on its strategies is also discussed. The revolutionary step of the creation of the Alphabet Inc. was
done by Google and the decision has also been analysed in terms of the strategic decision making
of Google. The report is concluded with a discussion on the influences on the strategy and the
decision making of Google also with regard to the establishment of the new company.

2INFLUENCING ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY
Table of Contents
Introduction:....................................................................................................................................3
Google’s corporate Strategy:...........................................................................................................3
Whether Google has a clear vision of what it wants to become:.....................................................7
Google’s diversification of products and business:.........................................................................8
The need for Google to refocus:....................................................................................................12
The delineation of the corporate boundaries and businesses or products to be abandoned or sold:
.......................................................................................................................................................14
Influences on Google’s Strategies and complexity and ambiguity of strategic decision making: 15
Conclusion:....................................................................................................................................16
References:....................................................................................................................................18

3INFLUENCING ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY
Introduction:
Google is a multinational public corporation and develops internet based services and
also products. The biggest and the most famous search engines is Google. It has to its credit
more than a billion searches. The company was started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as a
research project at the time of their PHD in Stanford University. Google is one of the most
dominant search engines possessing a market share of 65%. The search engine is so powerful
that the word “Google” is often used as a verb which means to search. The headquarters of
Google is Googleplex which is at Mountain View, California, USA.
The company earns its revenue from the internet searches, email, online mapping, office
productivity, social networking and also the video sharing services. Google is a user friendly
service which returns personalised results in the twinkling of an eye. More than 70% of
worldwide inline search requests are handled by Google, thereby placing it at the heart of most
of the user’s experience.
Though it started as an online search firm but at present it offers more than 50 Internet
services and products from e-mail and online document creation to the software for the mobile
phones and tablet computers. In addition to this the 2012 acquisition of Motorola Mobility gave
it the opportunity to sell hardware in the form of mobile phones. Despite the myriad products, the
original search engine tool remains the core of its success. In 2016, Alphabet earned nearly all of
its revenue from Google advertising based on the user’s search requests (Rugman and Verbeke
2017).

4INFLUENCING ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY
Google’s corporate Strategy:
The corporate strategy of an organisation refers to the overall direction and the scope of a
corporation and the way in which the various businesses operations of the organisation work in
tandem to achieve certain goals set for it. Well placed corporate strategies help in achieving
business success in the long run. The corporate strategies should ideally be flexible so that the
changes taking place in the business environment can be adapted to and the operations can be
modified accordingly. The corporate strategy also involves making the investors trust the
organisation and giving the organisation full freedom to utilize their money for increasing the
equity of the company.
The most common types of strategies that the organisations use include cost leadership,
growth strategy, product differentiation strategy, price-skimming strategy and acquisition
strategy.
The corporate strategy of Google is the broadest and is usually developed with the overall
mission of the organisation in mind. The corporate strategy determines the means for using the
resources in the functional areas of marketing, production, finance, research and development
and human resources in order to reach its organisational goals. Google’s corporate strategy not
only determines the scope of the business but also its resource deployment, competitive
advantages and an overall coordination of the functional areas (Pisano 2015).
Google provides a range of services and products starting from search engines, online
mapping, social networking, video sharing, radio and television advertising, online payments,
mobile phone operating systems, online productivity and several other information domains. The
primary corporate strategy of Google is related to diversification. The diversification strategy

5INFLUENCING ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY
was achieved by Google through corporate entrepreneurship, innovation and acquisitions.
Diversification enabled Google to increase its offerings and increase competition. As an industry
leader, Google used offensive strategies by constant innovation of its product lines and
expansion into other industries like mobile phones, maps, blogging, news and health. As a part of
its strategy, Google provided users with the most relevant search results on as many topics as
possible.
The growth strategy has also been very important for Google as the company has
launched several products connected to the internet to continue to influence the lives of its users.
Google’s corporate strategy involves accelerating innovation and strengthening brand
loyalty through transformational changes while creating an open source environment. The
corporate strategies increase the overall corporate value. It involves strategic planning at the
corporate level and therefore Google has been able to gain an edge over its competitors because
of its comprehensiveness, relevance, speed and also the user experience. By creating the
Alphabet Inc., Google has been able to create an umbrella or a parent company in order to bring
together all the companies under the same roof however with different streams of operation
management. However, the main source of profit namely the search engine was separated from
the other businesses in order to maintain the investor’s demand for transparent businesses.
Google has also been involved in several products and services apart from the most
important namely the search engine ad it was considered crucial to create a parent company in
order to bring all the other businesses under one roof the search engine remaining the primary
business.

6INFLUENCING ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY
Figure 1: The share of different web browsers
Figure 2: The percentage of the android device market

7INFLUENCING ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY
Figure 3: The percentage of the global market shares
Whether Google has a clear vision of what it wants to become:
A vision of a company is the indication or the thought of what a company wants to
become and it also involves transformational initiatives in order to create a specific direction for
the growth of an organisation.
Google is very much focussed on revolutionizing even the most backward corners of the
consumer technology business. The launch of several new products Chrome book, Pixel, Glass
and many more is Google’s way of showing the world what they are capable of doing. It has also
become successful in showing the world that they can do anything they set their minds upon.
Though certain things like the search box of Google remains the same as it used to two decades
back but the machine learning techniques are much better and the search results are much more
personalized (Choi and Varian 2012).
The aim of Google was to revolutionize the future and make information available at the
fingertips of any individual. Vision is basically the guiding force of any company. Google has
always been fighting towards the goal of organising information of the entire world on

8INFLUENCING ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY
innumerable topics and to make it accessible and of use to people all around the world. The most
famous product which was launched by Google was the search engine. After this several other
products like Google Chrome were launched by Google.
At a time when there were different reports about the simultaneous launches of numerous
products of Google, people were sceptical about the decisions of the company. It was commonly
believed that Google had lost direction of what it actually wanted for itself and for the future of
the organisation (Ledenyov and Ledenyov 2016).
The Company bases its strategy on the diversification and challenges in order to be more
competitive. In conclusion it can be said that the main goal is to make the information much
more accessible and global, whatever the diversification it has to do.
At the time of the creation of the Alphabet Inc., it created the structure for greater
independence to the different businesses of Google and it also answered several questions of the
public. It successfully established the fact that the greater integration of the brands is not the
actual direction of their business. The organisation proved beyond a doubt that it had a great
vision for the future (Cusumano 2016).
Google’s diversification of products and business:
Google is technological company with products and service that assists users in providing
and connecting with information. Core services from Google include search and display
advertising, android operating system platform, consumer content through Google play,
enterprise, commerce and hardware products.

9INFLUENCING ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY
Figure 4: The worldwide revenue from the digital advertisements

10INFLUENCING ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY
Figure 5: The online advertising market share
Figure 6: The product framework of Google
Figure 7: The search timeline results

11INFLUENCING ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY
The core feature of Google is the insinuation of development beyond the business of web
search. The mission of Google is the achievement towards its goals into the diversification into
new products with different purposes. The deliverance of quality enables people to search a
variety of information and deliver quality to empower computing power and advances software
(Glowik 2017).
A significant move was made by Google by entering into the web browsers and
telephones. It also launched the Android mobile development platform. The Google play store
was also launched for the mobile apps, the web store was Lunched for the apps on chrome and
the Chromecast in order to connect the television with mobiles or tablets. The launches by
Google have become the most popular in the past few years (Bassett 2017).
The Google Chrome was the most important browser which was launched by Google in
the year 2008, in the month of September. It has a 45% worldwide usage share of web browsers.
The entire business of Google is that of people using a browser to access the web. Regarding the
android and mobile telephony it was acquired by the company in the year 2005, in order to
develop smarter mobile services that are more aware of its owner’s location and preferences. In
this connection it can be said that there is a realistic view of the future market, free and open
source, flexible, fast and stable. Google chrome was a better competitor to the Microsoft’s IE
with an incognito window and browsing option (Bharadwaj et al. 2013).
Regarding the mobile acquisition, the Motorola acquisition was announced on August 15.
Google announced that it would acquire the Motorola Mobility for 12.5 billion. It included the
concept of innovation, the protection of android ecosystem and good financial deals.