Google It!

Google It!

With the staggering success of Google, Inc. in the past couple of years, one must assume that it takes a stellar managing force, filled with commitment, dedication, and superiority of its finance, accounting, marketing, and other business counterparts. On November 17, 2005, Google, Inc. surpassed $400 per-share in the stock market, something unforeseen in its beginning stages of development. Today, competitors loom only in the hopes to sell any of their services or ideas to Google in order to receive some of the seemingly incredible profit opportunity by being linked with dot com giant, Google. The strong force of management behind Google, Inc. has lead it to become a giant in today’s technology world; the doors are wide open for Google to advance into a technological realm that is untouchable by the company’s competitors, but where the company decides to go is yet to be known.

In the October 3, 2005 edition of BusinessWeek magazine, an article was featured on Marissa Mayer, who began a career with Google, Inc. in early 1999. The article detailed her position of managing the ideas behind the powerful dot-com search engine. Mayer turned down a teaching position at Carnegie Mellon University, in order to begin a career with Google, Inc. She did this without clearly knowing the success that Google would have in the coming years.

Mayer began with Google in early 1999, when the company only had roughly twenty employees. Although at the time she began her position inside Google Inc., Mayer claimed a title as one of the company’s programmers, she now reins the director of consumer Web products, and “…belies her power and influence as a champion of innovation” (“Managing Google’s Idea Factory”). It is through Mayer’s persistence and dedication to the company that Google stretched its success to where it is today with revenues on track to hit $3.7 billion this year.

Of course, Mayer can not handle all of this herself. Google has grown from its once small group of twenty employees to over 4,200 employees today. Mayer manages this group of engineers in supporting new ideas for the search leader, Google. Mayer allows her staff to take one day a week to engage in their own “pet projects” in order to come up with new and innovative ideas for the company. The feature known as “Google News” came out of this free time for the company’s engineers.

Mayer must decide weed out the good and bad ideas presented to the company. She helps decide which projects should be presented to the company’s founders. Mayer holds open “office hours” three days a week in order to hear the ideas of fellow programmers. These ideas must, of course, be refined and that is only through the workings of a great programming team and forceful management to stay on top of these innovative ideas and knowing when and how to market them.

It is through Mayer’s determination and long hours (the article states that Mayer works from 9AM until midnight each day) that Google has exceeded the rankings of its hard pressed competitors. Mayer likes to keep the company in close touch, just as it was at the start of this company’s work. Doing this, Mayer holds “movie night” a longstanding tradition for this company. Setting these movie nights is a job in and of itself, but allows the company to remain close and form the innovative ideas that continue to stem from this impressively successful dot-com company.

One decision Mayer and her fellow workers helped inspire was the decision addressed in the article from the October 17, 2005 issue of BusinessWeek. This article dealt with the alliance of Google Inc. and Sun-Microsystems Inc.. This alliance hopes to loosen the hold that Microsoft has on the PC industry. “Despite high expectations, the companies agreed to just a modest software bundling deal, with Sun planning to offer some Google technology to its customers” (“A Deal Pregnant With Possibility”). This partnership offers a big threat to Microsoft, who is Google’s archenemy, due to their impressive competitive gains.

The article later addresses the possibility of Google promoting and distributing OpenOffice and then using this program with its own search toolbar. The Google toolbar offers a way for users to engage in a search without having