The rise of Google, now a $6.1 billion company, has been fast and fierce. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met in 1995 as Stanford University graduate students. They created a search engine that combined the technologies of Page’s PageRank system, which evaluates a page’s importance based on the external links to it, and Brin’s Web crawler, which visits Web sites and records a summary of their content. Because Google was so effective, it quickly became the search engine of choice for Web users. Today, Google handles nearly 50 percent of Web searches. Google stopped displaying the number of Web pages it indexed after the number surpassed 8 billion in 2005, but some estimates now place the number at 25 billion. Google’s index also includes one billion images and one billion Usenet newsgroup messages. In addition to searching for Web pages, Google users can search for PDF, PostScript, text, Microsoft Continue reading
Business Strategies
Case Study: Kellogg’s Business Strategy
Kellogg’s is the world’s largest cereal maker since 1906 and is located in the United States. Kellogg’s products has become a part of the delicious mornings for the people around the world since a century. Its business is operated in two segments: Kellogg’s North America and Kellogg’s International. 66% of the revenue to the company comes from North America region which consists of the Canada and the United States. The remaining 34% comes from the Kellogg’s international market which consists of Europe (20%), Latin America (8%) and Asia Pacific (6%). The products vary from ready-to-eat cereals to convenience foods such as cereal bars, cookies, toaster pastries, crackers, frozen waffles, snacks and veggie foods. Obesity and Health & Wellness is the primary concern for people in the world today. Kellogg’s has invested on this trend by introducing many health focused products like Kellogg’s ®, Pop-Tarts ®, Cheez-It ®, Mini-Wheats ®, Nutri-Grain Continue reading
Case Study: Competitive Advantage of Hewlett Packard (HP)
Hewlett Packard popularly called HP is a company that provides technology solutions to consumers, businesses and all forms of institutions worldwide. The company later expands its operations to IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing services. The company is known throughout the world by operating in more than 170 countries around the world. The mission of the company is to facilitate how technology and services can assist individuals and institutions in addressing their problems and challenges so as to realize their dreams. The company applies new thinking and ideas come out with basic and valuable experiences with the technology with her IT corporation headquarter in Palo, Alto, California, USA. The company has been maintaining a lead among her contemporaries due to the effective strategic planning of the company and this has been jealously guided by the company in virtually all her businesses. How Competitive Continue reading
Business Turnaround Strategies
When a firm has experienced a serious decline in its market position, it is a candidate to mount an all-out effort to turn the firm around and improve its market position. Use of a turnaround strategy appears to be most appropriate when the firm’s decline is caused by internal actions such as improper strategy selection or poor implementation and execution of a workable. If the analysis indicates the firm’s present strategy is appropriate, then the problem is poor implementation. If the analysis indicates the firm’s present strategy is inappropriate, then the problem is improper strategy selection. Turnaround strategies attempt to revitalize businesses in a slump. They involve a combination of cost-cutting measures and revenue-enhancing strategies. Before a firm elects a turnaround strategy, two questions should be asked: Does the firm have the capabilities to earn an acceptable level of profits in the future? Will the firm’s value after a successful Continue reading
Case Study of Apple: Competitive Advantage Through Innovation
Apple Inc. is an American consumer electronic company which designs, develops manufactures and supports the well-known hardware products such as Macintosh computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Most of Apple’s products seem to be a trigger of revolution in electronic market and this reason contribute Apple as a market leader. The main strategy to run its business is not only creating new innovation product but also incremental improvement. The strength of Apple is “think different”. With innovative ideas and aesthetic designs, Apple has changed how people listen to music and communicate. One of the success products of Apple is iPhone which is a revolutionary device. It combined the feature of music device (iPod) and mobile phone technology with the key feature on this product that is “multi-touch” and “multi-tasking” on the graphic user interface. The phone supports a camera, a multimedia player, a blue tooth, web browsing and Continue reading
Case Study on Business Strategies: The Downfall of Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems has been described as “the last standing, fully integrated computing company adding its own value at the chip, OS and systems level.” The product line of Sun Microsystems include servers and workstations, Solaris operating system software for client-server networks, UltraSPARC and Java microprocessors, Java Internet software, and enterprise-wide support services. The major competitors of Sun Microsystems in the technical and scientific markets were primarily Hewlett-Packard (HP), IBM, Compaq, and Silicon Graphics. The information technology industry was extremely competitive and characterized by rapid and continuous change, frequent product improvements, short life cycles, and price reductions. This environment was forcing Sun Microsystems to rapidly and continuously develop quality products and services at competitive prices. By 1998, Sun was the leading provider of UNIX-based servers with a U.S. market share of 26% of all web servers in use. Sun was also a strong force Continue reading