Does Google have any core competencies? Explain. Core Competency is a company’s unique ability acquired from its founders that cannot be easily imitated. The core competencies are what give a company competitive advantage by creating value and delivering it to the customers. Google Inc. (Google) is global technology company focused on improving the ways people connect with information. The company generates revenue primarily by delivering online advertising. As stated in the case, Google Inc. s mission was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. ” Google Inc. ’s core competencies are what makes Google very user friendly to customers and successful in the market place. Some of the most important core competencies that Google implemented in its business plan include Google employees and corporate culture, its brand equity and the meaning that it brought the word “search. ” Google implemented an open and collaborative culture, which allowed its employees to come up with new product ideas that were exchanged and developed.
Google offers its employees a great number of benefits, but the company also requires that the employees are extremely intelligent and have the ability to think innovative and “outside the box. ” The company hires only smart, team-oriented people who can get things done. The interviewers at Google are looking for mainly four things: The Google hiring process can be very long and very different compared to the classic hiring process.
Once the above requirements are met, an applicant can be considered to join the Google team mainly based on the feedback of multiple other Googlers and how the applicant reacts to different situations during the hiring process among the team members. Google Inc. puts a lot of emphasis on the products that it delivers to customers. They are always trying to come up with innovative ways to help the user in its everyday life. Google puts such a big emphasis on the user in such a way that the “consumers feel a sense of ownership with the brand. While other companies spent millions of dollars on its logos and 200 pages thick in terms of how to use their logo, Google took a different approach and got everyone in the world engaged. They came up with the idea of “doodle-for-Google” where 180,000 students that participated sent the company the doodles and then millions of users online voted for the final logo. That was a simple way to show how easy it is to get everyone in the world engaged in one project and to gain market shares in the foreign markets much easier than other American companies would.
Therefore, the Google brand became so popular that it is now considered a verb in the Webster dictionary and it is one of the most recognized brands in the world. Google has many different products but its primary and most popular products are Search and Adwords. Google has made the “search” concept seem so easy and simple when in fact, behind the scenes it is a very complex process. By having that ability, Google has gained competitive advantage by making the information available to the user just from one click.
Adwords is somewhat similar to the search concept, but instead searching for webpages, the documents are small ads created by companies. The companies bid for placement but they only show up in alongside relevant search results. 5. Does Google have a distinctive competency? Explain. A distinctive competency distinguishes a company from its competitors. One of Google’s distinctive competencies is its name recognition and being known as the most popular search engine. This competency is hard for competitors to imitate and sets Google apart from the rest of the market.
Google has managed to provide the user with “the most relevant and useful search results possible. ” They believed that by offering the user with a high quality experience and providing the accurate information in a very fast period of time, the user on its end will provide Google with feedback and help increase traffic through “word-of-mouth promotion. ” Because Google became so popular, many businesses pay consultants a lot of money to help increase their rankings on the search engine.
Besides the main search-engine feature of searching for text, Google Search has more than 22 special features that could help the user find information much easier and some of the most important include: Through its speed and accuracy of finding the information for the user that is its main distinctive core competency, Google has gained competitive advantage over its competitors helping it gain market share and popularity worldwide. 6. What is Google’s Industry? Identify and describe the key success factors?
The technology industry includes companies whose primary function is to create innovative products and processes. Google is part of the technology industry due the fact that its always innovative, always offers the customers with the best outcome possible and is always promoting or inventing new products for its users. The technology sub sector is the search concept. Google is a dominant industry leader in this sector due to its ability to provide the user with accurate information in a very quick period of time.
According to its executives, the four factors as key to Google’s success are the following: Technology. Google is very innovative to the extent of building all its own servers from components it buys directly for their manufacturers. Business Model Innovation. Since the search concept was so successful, Google also strongly believed that by incorporating the ads, it will help generate revenue effectively and it will provide an even better experience for the user.
Brand. A European study recently determined Google to be the number one most recognized worldwide brand. It became so popular that it officially became a verb in the Webster dictionary. Focus On The User Experience. From the beginning, Google has put the user at the number one priority. The employees at Google strongly believe that the better the user experience, the greater the profits, the more popular the company.