Strategic Analysis
1) ROLE OF GOOGLE IN THE GROWTH OF E-COMMEERCE:
With the incredible growth of the eCommerce industry, experts around the world are expecting significant change in the future, and companies are taking stock in the market by investing more money than ever before in eCommerce technology. Google Shopping and recent changes to Google Analytics are also affecting retailers and their ability to effectively market their products and services. Google has introduced a new change that will “phase out free clicks on Google Product Search listings.” Once the new program called Google Shopping launches, ecommerce merchants will be required to bid on placement for their products for related search terms in Google. Online retailers will no longer see their listings appear in the comparison shopping service. Instead, this service will be replaced with the Google Shopping program, which will include paid product ad listings. According to Sameer Samat, Google Shopping’s Vice President of Product Management, “Google Shopping will empower businesses of all sizes to compete effectively, and it will help shoppers turn their intentions into actions lightning fast. Today’s changes are a first step toward providing technology, tools, and traffic to help power the retail ecosystem.” Google + has rolled out a new service that will now include local listings and customer reviews. Globally, eCommerce is up by more than 300% in the Middle East, with approximately 70% of transactions completed through cash-on-delivery.
Google has now introduced a new Mobile App Analytics for its popular webmaster analytics tool, Google Analytics. Mobile App Analytics will allow marketers, developers, and business owners to review data and measure the performance of their websites using several different tracking metrics as they relate to the mobile shopping experience. This free tool has garnered a lot of attention, as it simplifies the process of tracking website performance and allows marketers, webmasters, and developers to procure information directly from the source on search engine traffic. This new feature will offer a ‘holistic view’ of consumer preferences and buying behaviors on mobile devices, according to JiaJing Wang, product manager of Google Analytics.
2) COMPETITOR ANALYSIS: a) The Browser War-
Google Chrome Vs Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer:
A browser war is a tropical term that refers to competitions for dominance in usage share in the web browser marketplace. The term is often used to denote two specific rivalries: the competition that saw Microsoft's Internet Explorer replace Netscape's Navigator as the dominant browser during the late 1990s and the erosion of Internet Explorer's market share since 2003 by a collection of emerging browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera.
Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 on June 17, 2008, with performance improvements, and other new features. Firefox 3.5 followed on June 30, 2009 with further performance improvements, native integration of audio and video, and more privacy features.
Google released the Chrome browser for Microsoft Windows on December 11, 2008, using the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and a faster JavaScript engine called V8. An open sourced version for the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms was released under the name Chromium. According to Net Applications, Chrome had gained a 3.6% usage share by October 2009. After the release of the beta for Mac OS X and Linux, the market share had increased rapidly.
On March 19, 2009, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8, which added accelerators, improved privacy protection; a compatibility mode for pages designed for Internet Explorer 7 and improved support for various web standards.
During December 2009 and January 2010, StatCorunter reported that its statistics indicated that Firefox 3.5 was the most popular browser, when counting individual browser versions, passing Internet Explorer 7 and 8 by a small margin. This was the first time a global statistic has reported that a non-Internet Explorer browser version had exceeded the top Internet Explorer version in usage share since the fall of Netscape Navigator.
Race to HTML5 (2011-present)-
Google released Google Chrome 9 on February 3, 2011. New features introduced include: support for WebGL, Chrome Instant, and the Chrome Web Store. The company created another six versions of Chrome that year, finishing with Chrome 16 on December 15, 2011. The first version of Chrome available to the public in 2012 was Chrome 17, which was released on February 15, 2012.
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 on March 14, 2011. It featured a revamped interface and partial HTML5 video support, among other new features. It only runs on Windows Vista, Windows 7or Windows Phone. The company later published four previews of its Internet Explorer 10 browser throughout 2011. While the first two of these would support both Windows 7 and Windows 8, support for Windows 7 was dropped beginning with the third preview. The latest version of Internet Explorer 10 was bundled with Windows 8 Consumer Preview, which was available to the public on leap day (February 29) in 2012.
The concept of rapid releases established by Google Chrome prompted Mozilla to do the same for its Firefox browser. On June 21, 2011, Firefox 5.0 was the first rapid release for this browser, finished a mere six weeks after the previous edition. Mozilla created four more whole-number versions throughout the year, finishing with Firefox 9 on December 20, 2011.
Addressing the concerns of those displeased with rapid releases, Mozilla made Firefox 10 available on January 31, 2012. An Extended Support Release (ESR) based on this version was also available. The goal of the ESR is to provide an alternative to the rapid releases. Instead of constantly receiving a new version of the browser, Firefox 10 ESR users would keep the same version of the browser while benefiting from regular security updates plus occasional new features and performance updates. Those who continued to use the rapid releases with an active Internet connection were automatically updated to Firefox 11 on March 15, 2012.
In April 2012, Google browsers (Chrome and Android) became the most used browsers on Wikimedia.
By May 21, 2012, StatCounter reported Chrome narrowly overtaking Internet Explorer as the most used browser in the world. However, troughs and peaks in the market share between Internet Explorer and Chrome meant that Internet Explorer was slightly ahead of Chrome on weekdays up until July 4
The mobile browser war (2007-present)-
Due to the rise in popularity of the iPhone and Google Android, WebKit has become the most dominant layout engine. This has caused Web developers for many major Web sites to use proprietary or experimental features that only work in WebKit-based Web browsers. Competing mobile Web browsers — namely Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera — have a poorer experience when viewing most mobile versions of Web sites.
This has led to a Call for Action, from the co-chairman of the CSS Working Group at the W3C, to strongly encourage Web developers to use widely-supported Web standards in their Web sites. Additionally, the competing browser vendors have taken action to add support for some WebKit experimental CSS properties. b) Google Vs. Yahoo(Portal)
With technology constantly skyrocketing, it is easy to become overwhelmed while using the internet. Search engines, such as Google or Yahoo, make the internet so much easier to use. The tricky part is finding the most dependable search engine with the most accurate results. Important factors for finding a reliable search engine include ease of navigation, types of search results, and each search engine’s different features.
Some choose to surf the web using the cleaner, much simpler search engine, Google. Others may decide to go with a more cluttered and more advertised search engine, such as Yahoo. The Google homepage is much more straightforward and easier to navigate than the Yahoo homepage. The main feature on Google’s homepage is the search bar, as opposed to the first thing noticed on the Yahoo homepage, which is the giant news feed. This news feed features the top news stories for the country. Across the top of the Google homepage are options for image
Searches, maps, email and many others. Yahoo’s different options are located in a list style, to the left of the news feed. Also found on the Yahoo homepage are many advertisements, which tend to slow the website down, whereas Google is extremely fast and even includes a feature that shows how many seconds it takes to load the search results.
Depending on the search term, the types of search results can help decide which search engine is more dependable. On Google, when the search term “trees” was used, the top result was for a website that showed how to plant and care for trees. When the same search term was typed into the Yahoo search engine, the first result was a link to a page with pictures of many different kinds of trees. On the page of top results for trees, Google also conducted a map search, showing places to provide and care for trees and landscaping. Within the top results for trees on Yahoo, there was also a link to a shopping page, which allows you to compare the prices. c) Android Vs. Windows(OS)-
According to the Liedtke (2009) “If enough computer manufacturers embrace the Chrome operating system, it could weaken Microsoft while opening up new avenues for Google to persuade consumers and businesses to use its suite of online applications and other Internet services, generating more opportunities for Google to sell lucrative Internet ads”. This will greatly be a great incentive for Google and a disincentive for Microsoft because their operating system tagged Windows is quite expensive due to the fact that it adds an extra cost to the purchase of a PC. If Google’s operating system is successfully launched, it will be a fierce challenge to Microsoft who has enjoyed some kind of monopoly for more than two decades without any formidable challenge by any firm. Similarly, Womack (2009) has said that “There is a possibility that the new OS can break the paradigm Microsoft and Intel created over the past 20 years,” This is indeed an ample indication that there is plenty of business opportunity for Google in the information technology market.
According to the Associated Press (2009) Google says about 30 million people are using Chrome, a small fraction of the Web surfers who rely on Microsoft's market-leading Internet Explorer. If all their marketing and operation strategies fall in place, then Google will ultimately capture the market with its proposed operating system next year. At the moment the world’s third largest PC manufacturer, Acer Inc. have dropped Windows notebooks and replaced it with Android which in their opinion is cost saving and at the same time will enable the PCs to run faster (Liedtke, 2009).
At the moment, Microsoft is not lying low with the perceived threat from arch competitors Google; they launched their new operating system called Windows 7 to replace the Windows Vista which many analysts described as a failure because of many defects and technical problems. Also, Associated Press (2009) claim that Microsoft has been trying to thwart Google by investing billions of dollars to improve its own Internet search and advertising systems. This fierce challenge and competition between Google and Microsoft is indeed good news to consumers because it will in the long term bring the prices of operating systems to an agreeable level. d) Threats and Reactions Of Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon-
Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon have all joined in a court suit to block the court settlement of a 2005 copyright infringement class-action suit that would give Google the right to digitize, host, and sell ads against millions of published works (Myslewski, 2009). This is just a tiny bit of the threats faced by Google against their major competitors. Google agreed to pay $125 million to settle the copyright lawsuit. Microsoft filed a suit against Google in 2007 to stop the latter from Double click merging. Yahoo also filed a suit in November, 2008 against Google for the latter to abandon the attempts to overcome the objections of antitrust regulators. In February, 2009, Source tool a B2B search engine filed an antitrust suit against Google accusing it of upping it ads rates unfairly. Analysts in the information technology industry allege that some of these suits are the works of Google’s arch competitors like Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon. Gather (2004) claim that In January 2008, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion, but Yahoo demanded more money. At the present, instead of buying Yahoo, Microsoft decided to partner with the search engine in order to take on Google. Notwithstanding this agreement, Google will remain the dominant force with a share of about 65% in the search ad market.
In spite of all this gloom economic turbulence, Google is a long way from being in trouble: it enjoyed turnover in excess of $21 billion (£13.6 billion) during 2008. However, quarter-on-quarter revenue growth, which hit 14 per cent last year, was only 3 per cent in the three months to September 30, reflecting the slowing growth rate of internet advertising (Times Online, 2008).