E-Book Content
GOOGLE: FROM STARTUP TO INTERNET GIANT A few months shy of the turn of the millennium, Sergey Brin and Larry Page headed to the offices of Excite, a collection of popular websites and services and one of the leading tech companies of the time, in California. They were determined to sell their company and offered a price of $1 million to the Excite CEO George Bell. Bell declined their offer, even when Brin and Page dropped their asking price to $750 000. The two friends therefore left the meeting empty-handed and decided to continue developing their search engine, which was designed to classify and organise all the pages on the internet to make it easier to find information. At the time, there was no way they could have foreseen that this rejection and their determination would propel them to the head of one of the 21st century’s most influential companies and make them both billionaires. This book will explain how two students developed a revolutionary search engine that is now used by billions of people around the world. It will outline the principles and strategies that turned Google, which started life as a university project, into a tech empire in the space of just a few years, as well as the obstacles the company has encountered to date and the steps it has taken to overcome them. After learning about the main stages in its meteoric growth, you will understand how Google was able to succeed in a complex and constantly changing environment and develop an innovative, effective business model. KEY INFORMATION Founders: Larry Page (American PhD student in computer science, born in 1973, aged 25 in 1998) and Sergey Brin (Russianborn American PhD student in computer science, born in 1973, aged 25 in 1998). Founded: 4 September 1998 in Menlo Park, California. Sector: internet. Key figures:
1999: 3 600 000 searches and annual turnover of $220 000. 2000: 9 238 200 000 searches and annual turnover of $19 108 000. 2001: 27 474 600 000 searches and annual turnover of $86 426 000. 2014: 2 095 100 000 000 searches and annual turnover of $68 000 000 000. 2015: 2 834 650 000 000 searches and annual turnover of $75 000 000 000. 2016: 4 000 000 000 000 searches (estimated) and annual turnover of $89 500 000 000.
CONTEXT The purpose of technology has always been to help us perform increasingly complex tasks. The first technological advances date from over 2.3 million years ago with the invention of tools, which was followed by the domestication of fire. This kind of progress has allowed humans to survive, evolve and assert our dominance over a hostile world. In modern times, humans have used technology to make our lives more comfortable, but above all to stretch our limits and make our wildest dreams a reality. The discovery of electricity, the invention of the jet engine and space exploration would have seemed like pure science fiction to our ancestors, but now form part of our everyday reality. Creative visionaries have given us the computer and the internet, which are now used on a daily basis by billions of people.
THE COMPUTER The British mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871) was one of the pioneers who paved the way for the modern computer by developing the Difference Engine, an early calculating machine, in the 1820s and 1830s. However, the computer age only really began a century later, with the development of machines that could carry out multiple operations simultaneously. To begin with, computers were very expensive, which meant that they were only used in research and the military. Their use then became more widespread, and before long every researcher had their own machine. Over the decades, new inventions such as the microchip and the circuit board allowed computers to do more and perform more effectively. Thanks to companies such as Apple, Microsoft, HP and Dell, computers became more affordable and user-friendly, and pers