Skip to main content

Google - Case study with reflection + link to Google docs

The case study can be accessed from: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18tfwey_ZNtgt6GL4LtRNodJPLf6IAsNPKpb-A6ZqH78/edit?usp=sharing





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

Comments

  1. 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.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Product DB

This is how my Product Database on WIX look like. I am using a wix database from template to store my products. Database on my website is used to keep inventory of my products. In few words database can store price, product name, unique ID to recognise product, boolean values to tell user if product is available or no, and there is many more features when using a database on website.

Product ordering

To purchase cryptocurrency on my website we have to do following steps: 1. Go to OpenMarket 2. Select cryptocurrency that we are interested in buying 3. Add selected product to basket 4. After we select all the product that we are interested in, we can proceed to see the card 5. To make transaction we have to click one of checkout buttons 6. At this moment we should be able to finalise transaction by writing our card details, however, because I am using free version of wix we are not able to finalise our transaction.

Survey results and analysis + SWOT Analysis

In the last weeks I have created a survey to gather informations, which can potentially give me some ideas about my software and how I can improve it in order to fulfil expectations of potential clients. To analyse all of data gathered I used charts that were generated automatically in the Google Forms and SWOT Analysis of data in charts. In the first part of my survey I am asking respondents about themselves do predict if there are any chances that they are on some higher positions in companies that they are working for. The variation of both higher age and higher education - age 30+ and bachelors level of education and above makes possibilities that the respondent is currently on some higher position. I decided to use this variation instead of asking respondent directly, because I am aware of that maybe not everyone want to share such information with survey even if they are anonymous. As we are able to see on the chart there is an impressive number of people who have educati...