Yes, the company continues to grow at rates that will be the envy of the rest of the Fortune 500 But his main activity is slowing, its stock is down, the Android mobile platform have low income, and competition (hello, Facebook) is fierce. Can Google find its footing in this new world?
walk the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, and you are facing a world that sparks a little more than a little bleak as you just left. Massive stone busts of ocean explorers like Jacques Cousteau fix their view on the cobbled paths that flow into the main Google building. In the sunny tables outside, Google employees - the coolest, most confident techies you'll meet - eat their free food and talking about who-knows-a lively as complex computer algorithms, or the latest you have to make fun of young and wealthy Silicon Valley set, such as kite-boarding or indoor skydiving.
It looks a lot like the midday break in an elite college campuses. However, nearly 12 years after it was launched by the early Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google and its founders are struggling with a range of adult problems. Google's core business, online search, it slows down. This is partly due to Google's own success, it is difficult to keep setting record growth rates when you dominate the business so thoroughly - Google web to lead the U.S. market with 64% of all searches conducted. But more important, the Web has changed significantly since Google became a verb. There is (finally) of fresh competition from Microsoft Bing, and the new wave of sites and services that offer alternatives to the consumer time and attention -. And advertisers follow them
Google certainly knows it, but in a classic innovator's dilemma fashion, the company seems unsure how to move beyond core search business, which has brought such great success. Google has put a set of bets on acquisitions, chief among them its $ 1.6 billion to buy YouTube, $ 3.1 billion bet on the ad network DoubleClick, and more recently its $ 750 million purchase of AdMob mobile advertising platform. But none of these deals are still significantly diversified Google $ 23 billion-year revenues: Google focus continues to drive people back to the search box and the ad dollars that Google collects to help marketers reach a very targeted consumers. Even Google's most successful new products, the Android operating system for smart phones, creates a small income for the company: Google provides a free mobile phone operator license in order to facilitate, you guessed it, search and use other Google services on mobile phones. And while enabling its whip-smart engineers to devote part of their working day to dream up the coolest products for the web, everything Googley experimentation has not had a major impact on the bottom line.
That was fine when looking for work expanded to 30% or 40% per year, while Google's revenue grew at a double. Long-term projections for growth in the search business are 15% to 17% range. However, analysts estimate that 91% of Google's revenue still comes from AdWords and AdSense business model that Google built around page and Brin's breakthrough PageRank algorithm. Even more stories, an estimated 99% of their profits too much work. This year's projected earnings growth of 18% a third of what Google on average over the past five godina.Mnoge companies would kill for that growth, but for technology companies, and Google in particular, those numbers do not impress. Google is rounding the corner to all the fruit smoothies at its Silicon Valley campus make it difficult to draw from. This year, Google (GOOG) has joined the ranks of just about every major technology company before it, including IBM (IBM), eBay (eBay), Cisco (CSCO), Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL). Google against their will, and defying its massive cash hoard is transitioning from the company's growth - and there is no way to put it - the cash cow. That ranks right up there with the former supermodel, but deteriorate Google can not seem to shake right now, at least not on Wall Street. This is a big part of the reason that Google shares are down 21% from 4 January, the weak Nasdaq (up to 1 %).
against the ever-changing web-
Some investors worry about Google's ability to keep pace with consumers' evolving Internet usage. Say you want to buy running shoes to train for a marathon. Five years ago you could simply plug it into Google, look at the list of results, weighed your options, and made a purchase, you may click on one of the sponsored links that you get results. Today you can still do it, but all you can ask the question: "What shoes should I buy?" your friends on Facebook, or you might write: "who knows? about training for a marathon? "on Twitter. the service time of purchase Groupon sends you (and 25 of their friends) bid for the perfect shoes and registration for the race, you might just bump on it.
And what if you do not even ask questions? What if you just need help? Consider the case of American graduate student James Buck. Egyptian police arrested Buck for photographing a protest outside the city of Cairo. Using your mobile phone and his Twitter account, Buck broadcast a single word, "arrested". Buck Network warned officials at the University of California at Berkeley, who eventually won the U.S. State Department and local attorneys involved. Buck was released from prison in 24 hours. Try the keyword search.
This phenomenon is against Google. In ten years or more of the site and Brin came up with PageRank, web and how we use it have changed dramatically. As Buck's example shows, the web experience is increasingly mobile and social. We take it everywhere, and are linked to almost all the time. Google needs to find real success in this new world - or invent the next great evolution of the web. It is not easy to create a new multibillion dollar enterprise, but the rewards are great for companies that do not: Consider former Google ally Apple (AAPL), which is dominated by addition to the business (music player, a bit), which are more profitable than the one that brought him prominence (computers). Apple has just killed, and now the most valuable technology company in the world, with a market cap of $ 236 billion vs. Google $ 156 billion. So far, Google is tight-lipped about plans for the world outside of the search. Marissa Mayer, head of search at Google, says the company does not provide financial guidance, but argues that Google should not be a huge second act, a collection of smaller companies will dovoljno.Izvorni business search will always dwarf any subsequent new units. I Page, Brin, and Google chief executive Eric Schmidt just did not articulate a vision for the future of Google. "This is what scares investors," says Sameet Sinha, senior analyst at JMP Securities in San Francisco. "There is no clear path to what Google does, or wants to do ."
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