Sharepoint New Approach

In 2004, Google filed the following IPO prospectus:

"We serve our users by developing products that enable people to more quickly and easily find, create and organize information. We place a premium on products that matter to many people and have the potential to improve their lives, especially in areas in which our expertise enables us to excel. Search is one such area. People use search frequently and the results are often of great importance to them. For example, people search for information on medical conditions, purchase decisions, technical questions, long-lost friends and other topics about which they care a great deal."

Do you recognize anything ironic about the last example? Facebook is now the place that anyone would turn to connect with long lost friends. Search is no longer necessarily the dominant means for finding information on the internet -- people are connected through their social networks who they can ask directly for information. Did Google's geeky projects blind it to the importance of social networking online? The following case will outline investor concerns over Google's apparent lack of strategic focus.

Case Summary of RM Grant 2010, Case 21: Google Inc. Running Amuck?

See also this Google Case.

Reference 1: July 19th 2009: (Source: San Jose Mercury News)By Chris O'Brien: There are a handful of reasons people generally cite for Google's success. The power of its search engine algorithm. The elegance of a business model that matches text ads to searches. A restless, innovative culture continually striving to improve and evolve its products. Here's what always struck me about Google: its simplicity.

At the start, Google did one thing phenomenally well. Its search engine was so superior that the company's name became synonymous with search itself. And its home page was, and remains, a visual model of simplicity: a sea of white space, the Google logo, a search box, a couple of links -- and no ads.

That last feature remains an awesome example of restraint, forgoing what would most likely be millions of dollars in revenue to maintain an experience cherished by its users.

The homepage aside, though, Google increasingly feels like a company running in a thousand directions at once. Over the past year, it has released a steady stream of high-profile products that seem to have little or no relation to the core identity expressed on its corporate homepage: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The problem is that in expanding into so many different areas -- productivity applications, mobile operating system, a Web browser -- that the identity of Google itself has become muddled.

No doubt, this all follows some clear logic from inside the Googleplex. But from the outside, it's getting harder every day to articulate what Google is. Is it a Web company? A software company? Something else entirely?

This is more than just a semantic problem. That core identity helped build a bond with Google's users, whose fanatical devotion built it into the phenomenon it is today on the wave of grass-roots fervor.

Recall that in its earliest days, Google did little in the way of advertising or marketing. Its success was pure word of mouth, driven