Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Google SWOT Analysis

Google is a so successful company that has many products and services in hand. It's SWOT Analysis has been conducted by enormous people from business students to famous consulting companies. Today I am trying to make a SWOT from my perspective about Google as a whole company, not only its search engine.

Starting from internal analysis:

Strength:
High reputation accumulated from its search engine business.
Large customer base of AdWord, advertising, and service making Google easier to introduce new product.
Various product lines can be each others complementary even creating a whole ecosystem and bring extra customer loyalty, leading technology innovation and large scale of partners.

Weakness:
Freemium model makes relatively fewer customers would like to pay for Google's service.
Since simplicity represented Google, it's hard to follow fashion or create fashion trend. In other words, it's too much a high-tech company
Profit resource allocation is too unbalanced. Ad income takes too much portion of Google's profit.

Opportunity:
Number of Internet user is still increasing these days.
App ad and searching become another profit point of Google AdScence.

Threat:
Social media take more and more time of customer spending on the Net.
In smartphone OS market, Apple becomes more and more competitive and begin to create its own ecosystem as well, after establishing its own map and other services, starting getting Google's market share in  Internet service.

4 comments:

  1. What do you mean that it's too high tech? Can you explain further?

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    1. Sorry for the vague word...

      By saying too high tech, I mean Google has built its brand image among customers for a high tech company from search engine, however, as it wants to expand its business, Google has to come up with brand image and position more than high tech, but images such as fashion (Apple), user friendly and personalized (Facebook) to match customer needs in different services.

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  2. I think your point about Apple is a great one. More and more people are moving to Apple devices and as that's happening switching over to Apple applications. Maybe Google could look into opportunities to pair up with them on some joint projects?

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  3. It's interesting that you point out freemium model is actually a weakness for Google. Google is losing money since everyone is taking free ride, even though Google did earn a huge amount of money rely on this free and easy access platform. I think it a trade-off. Google is balancing between its pro & con.

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