- Mission Statement
When you open Google.com and click on "About Google" at the bottom, it takes the user to a page with links to details about Google. The mission statement sits near the top and reads: Google's mission: Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Their corporate philosophy sounds suspiciously like something from the "Terminator" or "2001: A Space Odyssey". However, since their emergence in the late 90's, that's what Google has appeared to do. They downloaded the internet twice. Not once...but twice. The "whole" internet! (Skynet, anyone?) This was necessary to provide their biggest service to users: their search engine.
- How Google Presents Itself/Website
Google presents itself as fairly simple, user friendly, and always improving and changing. The background has always stayed a stationary white color (unless Google is honoring a moment in history or a holiday), while the logo's primary colors are green, red, blue and yellow. Fairly easy colors to remember, right? The company itself is presented as an open environment that thrives through interaction and unique work atmosphere.
- Brief History/Products & Services
Google began in 1996. Stanford University graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page created a search engine called "BackRub". The engine used links to determine the importance of individual webpages. From that humble beginning, Google has grown incredibly fast; they now offer advertising and web applications (Google Music, Google Talk, YouTube, etc.) in various languages. As Apple did before them, Google invested in creating a mobile device division. This division was named "Android". This catapulted Google onto a whole new playing field, offering apps that are mobile extensions of their web applications and services. In keeping with their presence on the internet, Google made 75% of the apps on their market FREE for Android users.
- Target Audience
To be fairly blunt, Google's target audience is anyone with a computer/phone who has internet and is technology literate. Their appeal spans a MASSIVE demographic from age, to gender, to race, and even to location & class. As their mission is to organize the world's information AND make it universally accessible and useful, their target audience is the human race at large.
(again with the Skynet feeling....)
Google is a very powerful company, and honestly I don't think anyone can come close to what they can do, not even Bing!
ReplyDeleteYeah I agree, Bing is a division of Microsoft. They tried hard....but let's face it, Google has cornered the search engine/search advertising market.
ReplyDeleteNice post, Google is one of the companies that is becoming a staple of modern society. The phrase "google it" is fairly new slang but everyone knows what it means. I feel you on the Skynet comparisons, between google earth and Siri, we'll be running from gun wielding robots in no time!
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ReplyDeleteThis post makes me think of the movie "Hot Tube Time Machine" (I know - it's such a meaningful/deep movie.) One of the characters stays in the past and ends up changing everything including Google. He names it "Lougle". I can't think of one person that doesn't say "Just Google it." The company owns/controls a lot of platforms including part of YouTube - I can't help but worry about how much control the company will eventually gain over the way we go about our lives. The way they integrate every aspect so seamlessly just allows for people to be drawn to them.
ReplyDeleteI guess you really can say Google has monopolized the search engine industry in a couple of ways.
ReplyDeleteNice job. (And you've gotten some good comments, too.) You have demonstrated very good organizational skills, attacking each part of the assignment in turn. Even better, you've provided some good information on each of your sub-topics. The end result is that we learn quite a bit about Google. Their ability to make their service both universally accessible and useful has been impressive. Nice job.
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