–The nature of Google’s business
(i) Introduction to Google
Google is the biggest and best search company in the world
Google is the world’s largest advertising company
Google is the foremost leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning
Google is the most technologically advanced company in the world and values its engineers very highly.
(ii) Google’s Android business
Android (Android) is a company acquired by Google
The founder is Andy Rubin, also known as the “Father of Android.”
The purchase price was rumored to be just $50 million.
Against Microsoft. Against Windows, to be precise – Windows Phone
The first Android phone, the HTC G1, was created in 2008
Beginning the oligarchy of iOS in the smartphone era
(ii) The nature of Google’s business (Google’s position in the smartphone era)
(1) One bad decision.
Google has developed a new feature in the map, called “turn-by-turn navigation” (the implementation of the function is actually in the navigation, the system can prompt you how to turn, at which specific intersection should be how to go). This feature is exclusively for Android. If you’re using an iPhone, even if you download Google Maps, it’s not the same as the Android version and lacks some features.
It’s a bad decision, one that essentially stems from a problem: Google didn’t figure out what it was a company that did for a long time after the smartphone era.
Apple excluded video site Youtube from the list of pre-installed apps on the system
(2) Comparison of the two companies
Where the two companies differ.
Apple – the quintessential vertical company
Vertical Company: love me or love him
It’s a hardware company.
The main profits are from the iPhone and Mac computer series.
Destined to serve a segment of the population, make money off the device, and play a zero-sum game (because people who buy Apple will almost never buy Samsung, and vice versa)
Apple’s basic strategy: is to offer relatively high-end devices, abandon a portion of its customer base, and focus on those who are willing to pay a premium for Apple products and the Apple brand in order to maximize profits.
Google – the quintessential company of the parallel type
A vivid explanation of the parallel company: “Hair:, let the hair cling to as many clothes as possible, preferably so that you have me and I have you!
It’s entire business model is built on advertising, or it’s built on services
Google products: Google Search, Gmail email, Youtube video, Google Maps, Chrome, Android and Google Play app store
The natural mission of a company like Google is for everyone, as many people as possible, to use its services. And not the other way around to limit the number of people using their services.
Similarities between the two companies.
Apple: most of the cost, apart from R&D and design, comes from the material and supply chain costs of the device itself, so it’s dynamically variable – the company’s costs can vary a lot between selling 10 million units and 100 million phones
Google: most of it is definitely fixed costs (engineers, server data centers) is the big one – the only way to spread the fixed costs is to get as many users as possible to attract its real gold-standard, advertisers
When we look at a very small detail function to see the pulse of decision making across a company, you get an insight into how a company is thinking about its position and where it is going with its long-term strategy
Positioning (essence) – a company that earns advertising revenue by providing a service
Strategy – both for companies and individuals – often gets back to the basics of one or two issues. Smart as Google is, there have been times when it’s been confused.
–Challenges in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
I. Two issues
(i) Good technology = good product?
Historical event: 2017 AlphaGo defeats top human Go player Ke Jie
Good technology never equals a good product, much less a good company, a few examples
For Microsoft, Bill Gates and Paul Allen’s first product back then was called Altair BASIC, and the most familiar DOS system was actually bought.In 1983, Microsoft negotiated a life-or-death deal to provide IBM with an operating system. It was only from there that Microsoft, holding its thighs, began its twenty-plus year journey to glory.
You’re probably more familiar with the Amazon story. Bezos is not from a technical background at all, but seeing the Internet boom, he thought that it might be very promising to be a “store of everything”. Of course Amazon’s technology is also good, but for an e-commerce 20 years ago, the decision to start with a very standardized category of books, as well as providing good logistics and after-sales service, was more important than the technology itself.
Likewise for Facebook – Zuckerberg is certainly a genius engineer, but his first CTO, Zuckerberg’s roommate Dustin Moskowitz, couldn’t even program.The real reason Facebook got started was that it completely replicated the offline relationship graph in its early days, which allowed people to take the A lot of social behaviors move online. In a way it’s the same as Bezos moving his offline shopping behavior online. Technology plays a role, but this path that starts at Harvard, real names, and replicates real offline social relationships is more critical.
Apple is even less so. Great products, leading-edge design, and the vision of its founders have never been the most celebrated aspects of the company, and technology is just the tool to make those things happen.
Google’s start was technology-driven, but Google is not an exception, and Google’s technology is only a small part of the secret to its success, Google’s success lies in the fact that its products can be everywhere!
Google’s products are grafted onto the web. The web is Google’s user interface, and the entire Internet is the ecosystem in which Google is embedded.
Back then, the Internet web page was the only app store, the browser was the phone, and a web page was an app.
“You don’t need third-party applications on the iPhone, you just go develop web pages that enable software functionality. — Steve Jobs
The company’s origin (corporate DNA) – a company that has become the most important force in the world by virtue of the best technology, with products with extremely low barriers to use and easy ways to reach users, top talent, especially top engineers, is a lifeline for Google!
(ii) Where is the connection between Google and its users?
In the age of artificial intelligence, Google is still the world’s most technologically advanced company, but the product’s extremely low barrier to use and very easy way to reach users has suddenly disappeared
In 2016, Google’s CEO Sander Pichai announced that the company’s strategy had shifted from “Mobile First” – mobile first – to “AI First” – artificial intelligence first – Google Assistant
II. Two challenges
(i) Weakened links with users
Google’s connection with users starts to wane when user behavior is not just focused on one way to access the web. Even though it still has Android, it seems like people are more connected to hardware manufacturers when they buy Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, and Hammer.
(ii) Ads that are nowhere to be found
The commercial level – voice assistants and voice interaction – where to put the ads at this point
No matter how good the company’s technology is, no matter how powerful the product is, if the user can’t use it, it’s futile.
–The right transition: the Google Lens
I. The Google Experiment
(i) Google needs more vehicles to reach users. Making your own hardware is an inevitable path.
Pixel phones
Glasses Google Glass
Smart Home DevicesGoogle Home
VR-related equipment
(ii) Experimental results
It wasn’t a complete failure, and it wasn’t much of a success. But for a giant company like Google, it’s necessary to make a few experimental moves to set yourself up for the next step forward
Analysis of a company’s perspective.
First, how to understand the strategic direction of a company in terms of the time line of its important decisions.
Second, how to understand a company’s strategic intent in terms of attributes beyond the functionality of its products.
Third, how to understand the underlying characteristics of a company from the simplest and most essential questions.
If we don’t understand the essence of Google, we can’t understand the decision mistake of the Android special feature; and only by seeing how this decision mistake was corrected later, we can understand Google’s strategic thinking; similarly, only by seeing that Google seems to have made a similar mistake on Google Assistant, we can understand the unique logic behind it, and the strategic direction of its reorganization under the change of the general environment.
Second, Google Lens
(i) Google needs more vehicles to reach users. Making your own hardware is an inevitable path.
The role is that you can rely on cameras to identify and scan items in the real world – with Google’s massive amount of data behind it!
WeChat’s Bruce Chang once said that QR codes were the best way to connect your smartphone to the real world. Now, Google Lens eliminates QR codes, or rather, it puts an invisible QR code on everything in reality. –In the future, AR-based image recognition will be the most important application direction for the development of technology
–Inertia in corporate culture
I. Corporate Culture
(i) Good technology = good product?
Historical event: 2017 AlphaGo defeats top human Go player Ke Jie
The two most important messages are.
(a) First, culture is a company’s “underlying assumptions”, or “fundamental beliefs”.
Second, culture is the result, not the cause, of a company’s success.
Basic assumptions-basic assumptions-are some of the consensus, values, and beliefs that are already very much by default in an organization, completely out of discussion, and even remain largely subconscious.
(ii) Examples of Google failures – Google Glass, Google Glasses
- High selling price
With a price tag of $1,500, few mass consumers are willing to pay for it.
- over-expectations
After the launch, many of the features that Google showed in the demo video, including video conferencing and voice response text messaging, were not yet available. This led to a fall in expectations and word of mouth.
3 Poor experience
During use, Google Glass must be connected to an Android phone via Bluetooth, and the product itself often suffers from battery drain and other minor quality issues.
- user habits have not yet been formed
Users are not yet comfortable with this new AR device. The camera and video features of Google Glass are considered to be an invasion of users’ privacy.
5 Unclear usage scenarios
For a long time, Google didn’t have a clear usage scenario or a killer app like Instagram for iPhone 4 or Happy Farm for Facebook to show the potential of the new Google Glass platform. Therefore, its ultimate failure is inevitable.
(2) What does the failure of Google Glass have to do with company culture?
Google’s strategy and culture- We’re going to use the best engineers, the best technology, to develop a product with a huge potential user base (remember Google Glass was launched as the next platform after smartphones), then release the product and iterate like crazy to eventually get a billion people using it.
There are huge risks to this model when placed on hardware.
First of all, hardware products can’t be free for users to use, and the threshold for hardware products to be applicable is very high, so unlike Google’s other products
Also, and more importantly, a seemingly very simple truth that even we probably understand has been ignored by Google’s top leadership, which is that hardware is just much slower to iterate than software. By the time the product launches and word of mouth turns, it will be hard for Google Glass to turn things around.
Case in point extension.
- Companies where genetic inertia has led to failure.
(1) The cases mentioned in the previous debacle: Prince of Milk’s Li Tuo-chun was jailed for his consistent over-ambition and fierce expansion strategy; NVC’s Wu Changjiang returned to the board of directors twice with the help of his control of the distributors, and the control of the distributors was seized directly by Wang Donglei of Dehou Runda.
(2) Sony followed the product strategy of “seeking more for less”, unable to make the best of each product, and clung to its original CD-ROM business, missing the opportunity to acquire Apple and also the opportunity to replace Walkman.
(3) Nokia had already occupied a certain market share in the “smartphone” market, but the feature phones really brought revenue to the company, thus hindering the further iteration of smartphones.
In The Biggest Loser, Wu mentions three major failure factors.
I. A general lack of moral and humanistic awareness.
(ii) A general lack of respect for law and order.
(c) A general lack of systematic professionalism.
On the first factor, he cited the example of such entrepreneurs as Shi Yuzhu, Wu Bingxin, the vast majority of their personal qualities and morals are impeccable, and even self-discipline to the point of harshness, at the same time, they are also some very sincere “idealists”, but when examining their market behavior, we also see Another story. They are extremely contemptuous of the intelligence of the masses, they exaggerate and do whatever they want with their marketing and promotions, they are very oblivious to the rules of the market, and they treat their competitors with ruthlessness and parallel weirdness.
–Three things I learned from Google.
First, it’s important to set a visionary mission
One of the most important functions of a great mission is to be able to inspire everyone who is called by that mission to add to it. Often times even this act is very selfless.
In the case of Google, the mission was established in 1998 as “to organize the world’s information and make it available to all.
Additional example: former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wanted to search for a Japanese motorcycle called “Kawasaki H1B” and was dissatisfied with the results.
Google has established three principles in its internal evaluation of projects.
First, is this project targeting a huge problem, or specifically, one that could affect a billion people.
Secondly, is the project’s solution sufficiently “radical” – “radical” would be a neutral, positive word, more like “unimaginative”.
Third, is the project using breakthrough technology.
Only if these three things are met is it a problem that Google will invest resources to solve. And such questions will attract the best people to work with you.
Second, Google.
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