Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Google continued to grow rapidly both by acquisitions and by expanding into
other fields. For example, Google Gmail is now a major email service. Google's
office suite, Google Docs, competes against Microsoft Office. The Google
Chrome browser competes with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and sev-
eral more.
Microsoft became a fierce competitor of Google. In fact, Microsoft sued
Google to stop its key executives from joining Google, on the grounds that their
knowledge of Microsoft applications would benefit Google and be a violation of
employment agreements. This case settled out of court.
Google became famous for a somewhat quirky corporate culture and for a tend-
ency to be very eclectic rather than pursuing only a single business path. Its busi-
ness strategy is often hard to gauge because it seems to zigzag from one techno-
logy to another.
Like many other software companies, Google has a large nonprofit philanthrop-
ic wing and it started this off with a billion dollars in funding. Google supports
many charities and nonprofits in areas of poverty abatement, climate change, and
various public health programs. This is yet another example of software entrepren-
eurs with social consciences using some of their large profits for charitable causes.
Fortunately, this is not uncommon in the software business.
Staying on the cutting edge of software engineering research and equipment
research is one of Google's main focuses. The new Google Glass concept of eye-
glasses with an embedded computer is getting good and bad reviews. The Google
development of a hybrid electric vehicle is far from conventional software but
technically interesting.
Several Google products such as Sky Map and Google Maps are now among
the most widely used applications on smartphones. The recent flap caused by
Apple attempting to replace Google Maps with its own flawed mapping program
was front-page news for several weeks.
Google is one of the fastest moving and most rapidly changing companies cited
in this topic. It seems to crank out new inventions and products at a very rapid clip.
Many are useful and exciting, but not all. In any case, Google has added a great
deal of excitement to software engineering and is pushing software in many inter-
esting new directions. Among these is Google's research on secure programming
languages and better ways to prevent cyberattacks.
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