The case study can be accessed from: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18tfwey_ZNtgt6GL4LtRNodJPLf6IAsNPKpb-A6ZqH78/edit?usp=sharing
Google – Company and services
Google – Company and services
Google is a company
founded by two students of the Stanford University – Larry Page and Sergey Brin
in 1995 (Google, n.d.). They started from a project of the page, which is
indexing other pages in the web to be accessible from one place and with that
kind of solution other students started to use their product. Further, they
have caught the attention of big investors and some of this investor coming
from Silicon Valley. Investors were that interested in the solution of two
students that they have decided to give them a cheque for a $100 000 and this
is how the company has grown from a small garage project to an official Google
Inc. in 1998 (Google, n.d.).
The Google company
offers many different services. Various services can be used by different
groups of people like regular users. A regular user has access to services such
as Google Calendar, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, etc. These
services provide a high-quality content and tools, which are easy, and free to
use by an ‘everyday’ user. Here is a good example of one of the Google services
that is well known for everyone who is travelling to another country – Google Translate,
this service is an online translator and nowadays it is that advanced, so it
can recognise a handwriting, voice or even translate text in the picture to
various languages with using of OCR[1] technology (Google, n.d.).
We can only imagine how big was the impact of Google company on our lives and
how much easier is now comparing translation services now and 20 years ago.
Further, the other group
of people that have access to more advanced Google services are software
developers. Programmers can buy an access to Google Cloud Platform, which
allows them to use all of Google facilities such as artificial intelligence,
image recognition, speech recognition, Firebase[2](Firebase, n.d.) and many
more (Google Cloud, n.d.). According to the Rackspace (n.d.), such facilities
could be potentially used when someone is looking to make a working software
quickly to save money on programmer teams. Moreover, Google services are widely
used in big and well-known companies related to games, video services, airplanes
and airports, etc. Google services are also used in advertisements and the
service responsible for that is called AdWords – this service is gathering data
while the user is ‘surfing’ on the web and tries to show only adverts most
related to user search and interests.
Additionally, according
to Callaham (2018) in 2008 Google released their very first operating system –
Android. Google was working on this system in cover, however, they tried to
speed up their work after Apple released their first, but very innovative
smartphone called iPhone (Callaham, 2018). Statistics from the Statcounter (n.d.)
shows that the Android OS[3] has about 72% of the whole
mobile market in Europe in May 2018, which makes this system most frequently used
mobile operating system in Europe.
Figure 1: Statistics from StatCounter. CALLAHAM, J.,
2018
Google operating system
is used in most of the smartphones nowadays by such big companies like Samsung,
HTC, Motorola, Nokia, and the list of companies, which are using Android is
much longer than only these that I have mentioned. Companies can easily use and
customise this operating system as it is on an open-source license – AOSP (Android,
2018). Furthermore, Android is releasing own phones branded as Nexus and Pixel
with collaboration with other companies like Samsung or Motorola, but these phones
are using not customised and clean Android software, which makes the software
is always up to date.
In addition, just to
mention that the Google corporation is also making operating systems for
smartwatches and notebooks – wear OS and Chromebook[4]. However, these are not so
often used and popular as other Google products as for example Chromebook is
limited and you are not able to do some task, which needs a good performance,
they are designed rather to ‘surf’ the web instead.
To conclude, in this case study
I explained slightly how Google company was founded and who was the founder, what Google services are
available for daily users and showed on an example how we can use their services. Further, I have introduced Google
Cloud Platform, which is a tool for software developers and there was also some
example how it is used and these with the addition
of Android OS were the main points of this case study. However, I have shortly
mentioned that these services are not the only one that Google has to offer and there are also notebooks and
software for smartwatches produced by this company.
As my reflective, I am
thinking that the company have a big potential and impact on our daily life as
I cannot imagine searching the web without Google search engine. Further, I think
that Google is a monopolist in some
sectors of IT as almost every Google service is connected to each other and
that makes it easy for example to store some big file on Google Drive and send
it through Gmail or share to a Google + community. I also remember very first
Android smartphones and I am or I was able to see the growth of Android users over
many years and it was massive. The way
that Android works this day and looks
makes it very attractive and it is also attractive because we can buy a phone from different companies with Android onboard
and we know what to expect from the software and phone.
References:
·
Android.
(2018). Content License | Android Open
Source Project. [online] Available at:
https://source.android.com/setup/start/licenses [Accessed 4 Jun. 2018].
·
CALLAHAM,
J. (2018). The history of Android OS: its
name, origin and more. [online] Android Authority. Available at:
https://www.androidauthority.com/history-android-os-name-789433/ [Accessed 4
Jun. 2018].
·
Firebase.
(n.d.). Firebase. [online] Available
at: https://firebase.google.com [Accessed 4 Jun. 2018].
·
Google
(n.d.). How we started and where we are
today [online] Available at:
https://www.google.com/about/our-story/ [Accessed 4 Jun. 2018].
·
Google
Cloud. (n.d.). Google Cloud Computing,
Hosting Services & APIs. [online] Available at: https://cloud.google.com/ [Accessed 4 Jun. 2018].
·
Rackspace.
(n.d.). Managed Google Cloud Platform. [online]
Available at:
https://www.rackspace.com/en-gb/managed-google-cloud/professional-services
[Accessed 4 Jun. 2018].
·
StatCounter.
(n.d.). Mobile Operating System Market
Share Europe. [online] Available at:
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe [Accessed 4 Jun. 2018].
[1] Optical Character Recognition
– recognition of text included in a picture
[2] Google no-SQL database solution
[3] OS – Operating System
[4] Notebook made by Google
Great to see your case study that is well written and infomrative, with very good references. I would like to see more context to your project and its development, and also seeing your final reflection on the project as a whole in a separate post.
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