Competitive Positioning

Market Size: Google would benefit from determining the market size for each product offering. Yahoo’s market size is 345 Million whereas eBay is 80 million. A portal can attract more customers than an online market place. This is also apparent since a portal also has shopping as a product offering. But without OS, no user can use any product or features. Hence the OS users could be considered as the entire user base. An OS with document editing capability is a basic functionality for most internet users.

Intensity of Competitors: Another parameter is the intensity of competitors. In the portal business, there are many players. In the online marketplace, though eBay is the major player, portals have also started offering “shopping” as a product. This reduces the number of buyers and sellers in a particular marketplace. In OS, there is only one big player, Microsoft windows.

Innovation: The next parameter is innovation in product business models. This parameter evaluates the attractiveness for Google in terms of the business model to determine which option will create the most innovative and new opportunities for revenues. The portal and online marketplace industry model would be very similar to the business model of Yahoo or any other portal.

Number of Platforms: The last parameter that we used for attractiveness is the number of platforms that exist and their weight. This parameter evaluates the possibility of other players entering Google’s platform and the risk of envelopment.

Competitive Positioning

Market Share: The first competitive positioning parameter is the market share with respect to search query rates. Since Google’s main technology is search, it can better use the technology in Portal and online marketplace businesses but not necessarily as much as in the online OS.

Innovation Level: The second parameter is the innovation level.