MGMT 4402 Strategic Management & Decision Making Individual Mini Research Paper Your paper should be an 5-7 page double-spaced, with one inch margins and 12 point font. Grades will be based upon the...

Running Head: STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT & DECISION MAKING    1
STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT & DECISION MAKING     10
MGMT 4402
STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT & DECISION MAKING
INDIVIDUAL MINI RESEARCH PAPER ON GOOGLE
Table of Contents
Introduction and Overview of the Business Model    3
Short Overview of Google and its Competitive Landscape    3
SWOT Analysis of Google    4
Timeline of Major Events in the Last 5 Years    5
Current day Business Strategies of Google    6
Business Issues Current Facing Google    6
Immediate Threats Google Could Face within Next 3 to 5 Years    6
Ethical, CSR and Human Right Issues    7
Leadership, Decision Making and Strategy Overview of Google    7
Conclusion    8
Future Business Predictions    8
References    10
Appendix    13
Introduction and Overview of the Business Model
Short Overview of Google and its Competitive Landscape
    Google was established in 1998 by its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as a search engine. The exclusivity of services and high popularity, gave the company considerable boost in the first five years. Based on the considerable growth the company attained within the first five years, it started to optimize its search engine to become better, faster and more accurate along with launching new services to capture slowly more of the available market space. The company maintained its tendency of retaining innovation at its core.
Over the course of years, it released new services and in the last few years, it has started to launch its own range of products, although all of the products and services are associated with the information technology industry. It is seen that although Google have started its business, based on the advertising business model, it has evolved over the years and has refined its business strategies and models, transiting into the behavioral business model. Google’s innovation to offer new services and products for making the flow of information more convenient for human society and environment is an ongoing process and Google is making remarkable use of information technology (Fortune, 2018).
    Google, despite being an American origin company, it has acquired a global status in terms of market penetration. In terms of the degree of competition, it is found that Google faced competition from the likes of Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, DuckDuckGo and many more Search engines (Reliablesoft, 2019). However, the immense popularity and the superior use of algorithms have make Google the market leader, undermining the degree competition in the market. As mentioned by Aliabadi, Avşar, Yousefnezhad and Aliabadi (2019), the use of Google’s search engine has acquired so very high acceptance among the global masses, making it a synonym for search engine.
Google uses the high popularity of its brand name for tying up organizations and data source providers, who act as the suppliers for the company. The suppliers, considering the immense market Google have as a search engine, exert very little bargaining power, however, in recent times, the increasing usage of alternative search engines are giving Google’s suppliers more bargaining power. As mentioned by Baxter (2019), as a supplier exert lower bargaining power in the market the degree of competition declines.
    The customers in the market, use Google as their primary search engines and the information base and the wide degree of local connectivity, supported by Google Applications make majority of the customers ignore the alternative search engines, which hint at the fact that the customers in the market has very little bargaining power. Considering the rate, at which Google is earning its profit and the degree of its market penetration as well as business expansion, it can be seen that there is minimal threat of new entrant in search engine market.
Lastly, it is also seen that Google faces no threat of substitute in the current market. As mentioned by Abu-Rahma and Jaleel (2019), as the use of internet has become a basic commodity of life and the use of search engine has been considered as the gateway to personalized information and cannot be substituted with the alternatives.
SWOT Analysis of Google
    It is found that Google is highly popular globally and therefore, majority of the people in the world who use search engines, opt for Google only, which gives the company huge popularity and it is one of major strengths. As mentioned by Chen, Li and Liu (2019), it is also seen that brand popularity brings in new business potential and is beneficial for business organizations. It is also worth the mention that native synchronization among Google applications is also a major strength, which allows the customers to enjoy array of aligned services within a technological eco-system (Google, 2019). On the other hand, the Google’s core focus on advertising generated revenue and the ethical complication it faces in terms of the traffic of internet users to the business organization-based results are its major weaknesses.
    In terms of the opportunities, it can be assumed that Google can earn more revenue, expand its range of...