Google’s Mission Strategy Beyond Google’s Mission Statement

Did Google even feel the pinch of the Great Recession? Hardly. Some in the investment world thought it was a combination of ego and a big joke when Google’s IPO (Initial Public Offering) debut at $85 per share in August 2004. We watched to see the stock price tank, but the balloon has not busted yet. Today (April 14, 2011), GOOG (the ticker symbol for Google, Inc.) closed at $578.51. In the year the Great Recession began, Google stock price hit an all-time high of $714.87 per share on December 7, 2007.

Today, computer literate people casually speak of Google as a verb: “google (this)” or “google (that)”. The Oxford Dictionary made the verb usage of “google” official in 2006. But let’s go back a decade from that.

The year was 1996. The place was Stanford University in Menlo Park, California, USA. The players were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two graduate students who built a search engine they called BackRub. The concept of the search engine was to use hyperlinks to rank individual web pages by how important each web page was.

In 1997 the duo decided on a new name to replace BackRub. They agreed on Google, a variation of “googol”, which is “a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.” In view of “googol”, the number “trillion”, which has just 12 zeros, is like one penny! The new name reflected the couple’s dream to organize an endless amount of information. But the infinity mindset of Google would pursue much more than “information”.

By 1998 Larry and Sergey had formalized their ideas enough to create the search engine company with the mission “to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

That may be Google’s formal mission statement, but the company obviously has some unwritten agendas as seen in their corporate behavior over these 13 years of doing business. Google’s agenda is three-fold:

(1) Dominate the search engine business, and the advertising revenue that comes with Internet searches.

(2) Keep or make the Internet fast and free.

(3) Make Internet-related technology cheap and hassle-free. (Google hates for Internet users to put up with high cost and complexities. Google has done for the Internet what Microsoft has done for personal computers.)

Google’s acquisitions, partnerships or investments reveal the company’s priorities of a fast, free, and profitable Internet. In many ways Google has not been as innovative a company as it appears. Nothing like Apple on the technology hardware and software front. Instead, Google has a knack for identifying small innovative companies whose resources and skills can enhance Google’s operation and influence in the marketplace.

Google is more like the technology talent scout that spots and swoops down on cutting-edge technology firms to bring them into the Global Google Kingdom. Though Google’s innovation lies in targeted Internet searches, everything else the company does has largely resulted from having the money to gobble up innovative technologies. Why innovate when you can buy innovators with their innovations? A no brainer for a cash-flushed corporation!

Read part two of this article >> Google Goes Shopping: 27 Strategic Google Acquisitions, Partnerships, Investments