In 1995, Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University and quickly spawned a revolutionary friendship that has lasted 19 years and billions of dollars thus far. In its nascence, however, Google was a small Internet garage-office-based company (pictured above) that had no intention of expanding as quickly as it did (33). A privately held company for the first eight years, Google accomplished linking ads with key words and patenting the PageRank mechanism, which ranks websites on a viewers home page based on the popularity of the website (34). Google soon eclipsed their small space and moved into a new building in Mountain View, California, which was nicknamed the Googleplex (43). Google went public in 2004 and initially offered 9,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share (23). Since going public, Google has created a slough of new products, some successful, some less so, that have taken over the technological market. Products such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Phone, and Google Wallet, are just a small handful of the thousands of products Google has launched in the last decade. Because of this outstanding growth, Google’s market capitalization has grown to $397 billion (43).
In addition to the products that are easily released onto the market such as the ones discussed in the previous paragraph, Google also has a division called Google X, which is dedicated to making major advancements in the field of technology. From this facility, supervised by Sergey Brin, Google has created products such as Google Glass, Self-Driving Cars, and Project Loon, which are three of the newest Google products researched on this website. Indeed, Google’s thirst for creativity has caused Google to create the 70/20/10 rule (45). This means that 70 percent of an employees time is dedicated to core business, 20 percent is dedicated to emerging products, and 10 percent is involved in completely new ideas that have a high chance of either failure or reward (53). From this ten percent time utilized in unique and imaginative ways, Google continues to create emerging products that have the capacity to change the world such as those which I explore in more depth on the other pages of this website.
Refer to Video 1 on Video References Page
The Google Empire 