blog post 5

What’s next for Google?

Google, which runs the world’s most popular internet search engine, recently conducted a crazy plan that is to send Google balloons into the stratosphere. This project fits Google’s evolving strategy, as Google has always been changing how people find information and do business. The initial mission of Google is to organize the world’s population, and now it’s making efforts to automate and simplify people’s daily interactions. There is a serious business purpose behind this project. Although Google is the most successful internet company and has dominated the web search, it relies on advertising to pursue revenue at a large extent. However, internet advertising businesses are facing long term challenges. Last week, Google posted better-than-expected third-quarter earnings, with revenue of $14.9-billion, sending its stock price soaring past the $1,000-a-share mark. The solid results masked some troubling trends. Google received a large boost in ad volume, which itself was due to a surge of mobile advertising, but while such ads are quickly becoming a major portion of all Internet advertising, they tend to generate less revenue. Actually, the ads at the very heart of Google’s business model for the past 15 years are slowly losing value, and no company has figured out how to reverse that trend. At the Google campus in Mountain View, there’s a sense that virtually all these projects are part of a wider, more ambitious effort by the company to expand its role as the chief middleman of Internet search into a variety of other areas. That takes new technology, a stomach for risk and big ideas. According to the director of engineering at Google Canada, the unifying theme at Google is the bigness of it all, and it makes huge bets in areas that can be dramatically impactful in the future. Indeed, part of the lure of the company to engineers is the deep uncertainty and grand potential of Google’s many big bets – with little indication which will fail, and which will end up transforming parts of society.

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References:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/us-business/growing-plans-inside-googles-expanding-world/article15096740/