Question

GOOGLE Started in the late 1990s, Google grew rapidly to become one of the leading companies in the world. Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It is operating on a simple but innovative business model of attracting Internet users to its free search services and earning revenue from targeted advertising. In the winner-takes-all business of Internet search, Google has captured considerably more market share than its next highest rival, Yahoo!. This has turned Google’s Web pages into the Web’s most valuable real (virtual) estate. Through its two flagship programs, AdWords and AdSense, Google has capitalized on this leadership position to capture the lion’s share in advertisement spending. AdWords enables businesses to place ads on Google and its network of publishing partners for as low as 25 cents per thousand impressions. On the other hand, it uses AdSense to push advertisements on publishing partners’ Web sites targeting specific audience and share ad revenue with the publishing partner. This creates a win–win situation for both advertisers and publishers and developed Google into one giant sucking machine for ad revenue. However the European Union recently fined Google $2.7 billion for using its dominant position to favor its own price comparison service, Google shopping. This is illegal under EU law as it is unfair to rivals and denied consumers a real choice among competitor services in thirteen European countries. Even as a large company, Google continues to take risks and expand into new markets. It currently offers over 120 products or services, including google translate, google maps, google+ social network and Android, the worlds most used operating system. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders, declared in Google’s IPO prospectus, “We would fund projects that have a 10% chance of earning a billion dollars over the long term. . . We place smaller bets in areas that seem very speculative or even strange. As the ratio of reward to risk increases, we will accept projects further outside our normal areas.” They further add that they are especially likely to fund new types of projects when the initial investment is small. Google promotes a culture of creativity and innovation in a number of ways. IT encourages innovation in all employees by allowing them to spend 20% of their time on a project of their own choosing, and to switch between project teams. In addition, it offers benefits such as free meals, on-site gym, on-site dentist, and even washing machines at the company for busy employees. Managers have both a portfolio of projects and a portfolio of people to manage: Google has a cross-functional (matrix) organizational structure but with as few middle managers as possible.. Despite open and free work culture, a rigid and procedure-filled structure is imposed for making timely decisions and executing plans. For example, when designing new features, the team and senior managers meet in a large conference room. They use the right side of the conference room walls to digitally project new features and the left side to project any transcribed critique with a timer clock giving everyone 10 minutes to lay out ideas and finalize features. Thus, Google utilizes rigorous, data-driven procedures for evaluating new ideas in the midst of a chaotic innovation process. Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, outlines nine notions of innovations embedded in the organizational culture, processes, and structure of Google. 1. Ideas come from everywhere: Google expects everyone to innovate, even the finance team. 2. “Innovation; not instant perfection”: Google employees can take a good idea and experiment to improve upon it. 
 Google launches early and often in small beta tests, before releasing new features widely. 3. “A license to pursue dreams”: To help promote innovation, Google employees get one “free” 
day each week to work on their pet ideas. Half of new launches come from this ‘‘20% time.’ 4. “Morph projects, don’t kill them”: Google employees should always to find something
salvageable in projects that aren’t pursued 
 5. “Share everything you can”: Google employees have a lot of collective knowledge. To encourage sharing, each employee writes an e-mail on Monday with five to seven bullet points of what they learned earlier and Google then consolidates this information and makes it available to the employees. 
 Every idea, every project, every deadline—it’s all accessible to everyone on the intranet. 6. “Worry about usage and users, not money: Google will be successful if we can please the users; advertisers (and their money) will follow. 
 7. Don’t politic, use data “Data is apolitical”: Mayer discourages the use of ‘‘I like’’ in meetings, pushing staffers to use metrics”: Design is a science at Google. Good ideas must be supported with evidence. 
 8. “Creativity loves constraints”: Google employees work best when they are challenged and have to think outside the box. Give people a vision, rules about how to get there, and deadlines. 
 9. “You’re brilliant? We’re hiring”: Google likes to hire really smart people—even if they may not have a lot of experience.
 Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approve hires. They favor intelligence over experience. Keeping up with the organizational strategy of Google, its IT department provides free and open access to IT for all employees. Rather than keeping tight control, Google allows employees to choose from several options for computer and operating systems, download software themselves, and maintain official and unofficial blog sites. Google’s intranet provides employees information about every piece of work at any part of Google. In this way employees can find and join hands with others working on similar technologies or features. In building the necessary IT infrastructure, Google’s IT department balances buying and making its own software depending on its needs and off-the-shelf availability. For example, it uses Oracle’s accounting software, whereas it built its own customer relationship management (CRM) software, which it then integrated with its ad systems. It also supports open source projects both by extensively using open source software within the organization and by paying college students to contribute to them through programs like Summer of Code. Google’s Ads Data Infrastructure systems run the multibillion dollar ads business at Google. High availability and strong consistency are critical for these systems. Google builds systems that run in multiple datacenters all the time, and adaptively move load between datacenters, with the ability to handle outages of any scale completely transparently, causing minimal disruption to the operational system. Their F1 system is a distributed relational database system that combines high availability and the scalability of NoSQL systems, and the consistency and usability of traditional SQL databases. Mesa is a petabyte-scale data warehousing system with high availability, reliability, fault tolerance, and scalability for large data and query volumes. In addition, Google also develops generic applications such as GoogleApps for both internal and external use. Given the nature of business, security of information resources is critical for Google. For instance, its master search algorithm is considered a more valuable secret formula than Coca- Cola’s. However, rather than improving IT security by stifling freedom through preventive policy controls, Google puts security in the infrastructure and focuses more on detective and corrective controls. Its network management software tools combined with 150 security engineers constantly look for viruses and spyware, as well as strange network traffic patterns associated with intrusion.

1. Which underlying principles and factors affect Google’s organizational functions and systems in a global environment? 
2

6. What does Google use as information sourcing options, explain your answers

Answer 1

1. The key underlying principle behind Google's philosophy is its propensity for innovation and how it enourages innovation in all things that it does as an organization. Google promotes a culture of creativity and innovation in a number of ways. IT encourages innovation in all employees by allowing them to spend 20% of their time on a project of their own choosing, and to switch between project teams. Google utilizes rigorous, data-driven procedures for evaluating new ideas for innovation. The company encourages a culture where people share their work and ideas so that others can build upon them; this is facilitated by open IT Systems as well where people are supported with their choices on technology too. Google also likes to hire smart people and values intelligence over experience. Google realizes that it must encourage freedom amongst its emploees as well and tunes its underlying IT practises towards that as well.

2. Google has over time used its products like Adwords and Adsense to obtain information about the user. Its search product itself is a source of information as it indexes all the webpages in cyberspace and can claim to be a dictionary of the web itself. Its network management tools are a great source of network related information including those about viruses, spyware, malware etc.