Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford University in 1995 and three years later a small US company was born that was to quickly develop and change all our lives globally. The company was Google and on Sunday September 7th it celebrates its 10th birthday.
In the same way that it’s hard to imagine a world without Amazon, it’s now hard to imagine the Internet without Google. In 1999 it only had 9 employees! Google is now the 4th largest technologies company in term of market valuation, employees some 19,600 staff, which on revenues of $19.6 billion now generate $1million a head! As we reported earlier this week they now dominate the world of search generating in July alone some, 48.7 billion worldwide searches, equivalent to 65 million an hour.
They now are to introduce their Android mobile, they have already launched their office suite, Gmail, Google Talk, News, Maps, acquired Blogger and this week announced their Chrome, their open source browser to rival Internet Explorer. We have seen them hoover up the world’s library material, map the streets of major cities not just from the skies, but also from the ground. In 2006 they acquired the then one year old YouTube. Through their online dominance they now have a significant influence on all advertising. Most scary of all is that they know what you search for , when and what you did next!
They have not had a smooth passage, with many skirmishes with copyright owners and others on the way. They have overturned and out manoeuvred some formidable players such as Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL. They now have an influence on the future of state censorship in countries such as China.
Imagine where they will be in ten years time?
No comments:
Post a Comment