COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES
Google has sustainable competitive advantages because the remarkable scores accrued in measures of value, rarity, inimitability, and substitutability.
VALUE
Google’s search products bring value to their customers because they provide relevant websites promptly. Google has achieved the top market share in the search industry precisely because their product is rare. They are able to provide excellent links in the first few results for both well-known subjects such as “Dallas Cowboys” and uncommon, “long-tail” searches like “cerebrospinal fluid
As mentioned in the Value Chain section, Google excels at directing a large quantity of visitors to websites using its Ad Sense program. Many business are dependent upon the traffic Ad Sense brings to their website to generate income. For the advertisers this increased traffic translates into increased sales and directly helps the bottom line.
Rarity
Google’s search offerings are rare because of the relevancy of the results. Microsoft and Yahoo, Google’s main competitors, simply do not provide links that are as useful as Google’s.
Google’s website features a minimalistic design, which is uncommon. Most websites feature some sort of banner advertising and are littered with hundreds of words. The Google home page can only contain 28 words as a policy established Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the company’s founders. This keeps the clutter to a minimum which is a stark contrast to Yahoo and Microsoft’s search home pages. Google faithfully adheres to the provision in the mission statement which recognizes that “advertisements should not be an annoying interruption” . This rare service is testimony to their charge to never “compromise…user focus for short-term economic gain” .
Inimitability
Google’s results are not easily imitated because of the large infrastructure requirements to serve the relevant pages quickly. Google has servers all over the world all synced up and all running on a very large...