Google, huh, what is it good for? Absolutely everything!

Google, huh, what is it good for? Absolutely everything!

 

On August 19^th 2004, Google became an official IPO (Initial Public Offering) on the NADAQ stock exchange. The first trade was $100.01. The stock as of close on June 14^th 2010 was $483.19. The high for Google was $629.51 over the last year. The daily average stock volume traded over 50 days up to June 14^th was 3,876,462 shares. And Google has an estimated market value of $ 117,854,065,980.00 as of June 14^th. (This does not include stock splits comparing today’s values) (See NASDAQ quote for Google here)

 

What does this mean? This means that Google is an industry that investors are betting on. By using business models that are in some ways minor to the average user (such as using cheap hardware, see article) and by looking at uniformity and operating system independence, Google has developed a technical business model that has surpassed any known technical business model to date. They have taken the best of Microsoft’s and the Linux community’s ideas and created a model that application developers and users are running to. Let’s take a look at some:

 

1.       The Google App Engine.
The Google App engine allows users to create and run web based applications independently or on Google’s site. This allows for ease of development, constancy of access, and scalability. You can create your domain name (for a web site) using a support site appspot.com. The app engine gives you support by providing SDKs (Software Development Kits) for web based programing environments such as Java and Python. These will allow web developers to create web based applications more efficiency and with greater ease.

2.       Google Services:
Google provides services for the everyday user such as Gmail, Google Documents, Google Earth,  and Google Chrome.  Business Services include Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Google Enterprise Search, and others. There are a myriad of services that Google now offers. With these items almost any user can find things that they can use. Some items such as the Postini services offer security for mail and messaging.

3.       Google Phone:
Google, working with the Android OS, has developed a mobile phone system that is ranked 2^nd (only behind Blackberry) among smartphone OS’s. (See Wikipedia Article)   It has now surpassed the Microsoft Windows Mobile OS as of the same quarter in terms of market share. (See Blogpost) This particular product is phone hardware independent and has the Google technical support behind it to aid mobile phone manufacturers and providers in using the OS/Application combination. In my opinion, this will turn out to be a far more successful campaign than the iPhone from Apple.

 

Conclusion: Is Google going to take over the technical world? Possibly! But Google has demonstrated reliability, increasing innovation, security, and most of all product maturation. By using a similar version of Microsoft’s marketing model and using the Linux application development community, Google’s work has shown to be a great benefit to both the home and business user.

James Brun

Director of Information Technology

Beckfield College