Google Inc.: a strategic moveHistorySergey Brin and Larry Page met in the spring of 1995 during a meeting at Stanford University. Between January 1996 and December 1997 they created "BackRub", the precursor to the Google search engine. The goal was to better organize the enormous amount of data on the Internet. The name was eventually changed to "Google" to indicate the immense amount of information that resided on the Internet. Google is transformed from the word googol, which refers to 1 followed by 100 zeros. Brin and Page incorporated Google in 1998, just nine years ago, with $1 million from family and investors. The quality of Google's search technology has attracted a growing number of users. Many companies had Google as their primary web search engine. It took until 2001 for the company to be profitable due to its strong financial performance. From there they sold 19.6 million shares from which they raised $1.7 billion. Today, Google has continued to expand from being a Web search company to offering a growing range of services. It now holds a share of more than 50% of the total search market. In 2005, Google incorporated "Google Payment Corp." as it is working on a payment system similar to PayPal. They recently released a web-only video search engine that allows users to view videos without going to the host's site. Google is also said to plan to compete more directly with Microsoft in Internet browsing and operating systems. (Source: Fred David's Strategic Management 11th ed. Page 34-35) Strategy Summary Google is a single-line search engine technology product line company. To compete with other large companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, Google must develop a strategy for several… middle of paper… There were many other ways Google could have done this. An alternative was to create another company, part of the Google group, to work with other types of unrelated or related products and another company for marketing consultancy. Google is very good at marketing, they started selling ads, so having a marketing consultancy might be a good way to go. That's why they already have the experience and it doesn't involve a lot of money. Perhaps this would be a choice for the future; I believe Google made the right choice with this strategy. Sources: • Google.com or http://www.google.com/corporate/index.html • Strategic Management by Fred R. David Pg. 34 – 48 Cohesion Case.• http://www.dailyspeculations.com/google-paper-ellison.html• http://www.cybergrain.com/archives/2004/12/googles_vision.html