Google has the most recognized brand name (source: news.com) of year 2007 beating Microsoft and many other widely well known companies by fairly large margin. From this results, more people know about Google compared to Coca-Cola or Microsoft or GE! Take a look at the following figure for yourself.
1. Google--$66.4 billion
2. General Electric--$61.9 billion
3. Microsoft--$55 billion
4. Coca-Cola--$44.1 billion
5. China Mobile--$41.2 billion
6. Marlboro--$39.2 billion
7. Wal-Mart--$36.9 billion
8. Citigroup--$33.7 billion
9. IBM--$33.6 billion
10. Toyota Motor--$33.4 billion
Even after the incredible growth that Google has enjoyed, they are still looking into expanding and dominating the online market space. Not only developing and improving their own technologies, "Google Searches for Mergers Big and Small." Acquisitions of the big and well establishes companies in the recent months were meant to plug holes in businesses according to Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.
Google paid $1.65 billion to acquire video-sharing site YouTube in November, it's biggest deal at that time. Then, a month ago, it announced a $3.1 billion deal to buy DoubleClick, which offers advertising delivery technology and services.
On top of it, purchase of the smaller and developing companies are to acquire their engineering talent and their technologies to incorporate to Google of which most of them succeeded with astonishing figures.
Schmidt said that the company continues to view small technology acquisitions as the bread-and-butter of its merger strategy, mainly as a way to obtain new technology and talented engineers.
"In the past, we would buy businesses in lieu of (hiring) engineers," Schmidt said. These days, Google buys a start-up once every few days, or around one a week, he estimated.
Two examples of this approach—Keyhole (Google Earth) and Urchin (Analytics)—had strong technical teams, a technology head start, and were bought relatively inexpensively in the hopes of later generating billion dollar revenue streams, he said.
It looks like Google is absorbing all innovative technologies while other similar competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft is missing the opportunities. Because Google is web based and user base, such a fast growths and popularities Google has enjoys was possible.
Who would have thought Google could have beaten both Microsoft and Yahoo in such a short time in their established online market space? This shows that other companies innovative edge can do something similar to Google as well. Perhaps, Google knows this and that might be why they are trying to absorb all the big and small companies with good prospects or technology base.
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