Google's Decade

Fortune Magazine dedicated the cover of its magazine a couple of months ago to Steve Jobs and rightly named him as the CEO of the past decade. As a person who uses a small number of Apple's products, I think that that was not an exaggeration. Unlike most CEOs it is clear that Steve Jobs understands much better what to offer to consumers than many of his peers. While Steve Jobs won hands down as the CEO of the decade, I am convinced that the large corporation of the last decade has to be Google. The phenomenal growth of the corporation aside, I am impressed with the Google corporation because it reminds me of the fact that ideas matter enormously.

Unlike many of those who regard Google as either too dominant or utterly flawless, I give this corporation credit for defining precisely what the business model for the Internet will be like. In tracing its emergence and its technology innovations, Chris Thompson highlights the number of decisive ways in which Google changed Internet commerce through offering a new product and focusing on the utility of their products. It appears that products that work very well provide ample scope for profits. However, I do not think that the report is accurate in attributing the demise of newspapers to Google though and think that it is more accurate to state that Google proved that their business model was completely outdated.

Besides having made searching the Internet fairly easy, I am most impressed with the idea that makes it clear that as much of the world's information should be made available for people to search. That is the scale of ambition that could not be drawn up by an ordinary entrepreneur. It is that kind of thinking that gives me confidence that Google will still be a major corporation for a while longer. To me, Google has also proved that modern corporations cannot be defined by 20th century industry language for its most highly used product is provided at no cost and yet it is still very profitable.

Again, I found the mechanism that its founders chose for allocating its shares to the public really fascinating. By allocating its shares during the IPO through an auction, the price was derived from the structure of demand. Google seemed to bring lessons of applied economics to the fore. And as one can tell, they did pretty well in allocating the shares in accordance with the demand. A successful corporation in this age has to do several things exceedingly well.