...America Online (AOL) In the early 1980s, Case felt there was a latent market for user friendly online services. The online services provided at that time were very complex and costly and provided poor quality content. Believing that the online service market would evolve into a big industry in future, Case, Jim Kimsey and Marc Seriff founded AOL in 1985. The company was initially incorporated as Quantum Computer Services (Quantum). Quantum provided online services to consumers via PC modems. Quantum's first product was 'Q-Link,' a proprietary online service that routed emails and chat through its communication network (via telephone cables). Q-Link became popular in the market, and within a year its user base crossed the 10,000 mark. | | In October 1989, the company launched a private online service for all computer users in the US. The new service, identified by a blue triangle with a swirl in the center (the company's logo), offered games, e-mail, chat, news and travel information. In 1991, Quantum was renamed America Online and Case was appointed CEO of the company. ------------------------------------------------- The total customer base of the company during that period was 150,000, with total revenues amounting to $ 20 million. During the 1990s, AOL acquired Compuserve, Netscape and the ICQ brand. These acquisitions helped it establish itself as a global online service provider.4 During the same, AOL entered the e-commerce solutions market through an alliance with...
Words: 4685 - Pages: 19
...Siboni, and put down the phone. This was a crucial beachhead for Netscape in its quest for the corporate market. Netscape had initially won the KPMG contract, but Microsoft’s persistence had pried it back open. Beating back Microsoft’s latest challenge marked a great success for Netscape. This victory stood in sharp contrast to a far less happy dealmaking episode the previous year in which Netscape had tilted against mighty Microsoft for AOL’s browser business. In a sequence that gave some industry observers virtual whiplash, a pathbreaking Netscape deal with AOL had been announced, only to be undercut the very next day by Microsoft. Netscape’s ultimate loss in the AOL battle helped to define an Internet dealmaking ethos that the normally sober Wall Street Journal likened to Melrose Place in which “no player sleeps alone and no back goes unstabbed.”1 Barksdale’s mind drifted back to the trials and tribulations of the AOL saga. The Netscape Story The popularization of the Internet in the 1990s heralded a new age in digital communications. At the forefront of this dramatic technological shift was the...
Words: 7524 - Pages: 31
...Welcome to Team D’s presentation on Case #2 Google’s Strategy The presentation today will given be myself, Jon Vuchinich, Allison Fergusen, and Justin Pierce. We hope you enjoy. The search engine industry exists to provide a service to consumers and businesses. The search engine model has been built around the idea of providing valued content to both consumers of information and consumers of products and services. The model also exists as a way to provide marketing and advertising opportunities for businesses of all sizes. This is an extremely profitable business, with U.S. ad spending topping the 17 Billion dollar mark in 2012 (as seen in this chart here). As of July 2011, the top five rankings for U.S. search engine market share were: 1. Google 2. Yahoo Sites 3. Microsoft Sites 4. Ask.com 5. AOL As seen in the percentages here, Google is the clear leader in market share of the U.S. search engine market at 65.1%, but that does not mean they do not face significant competitive forces. The first competitive force we will talk about will be “rivalry among competitors”. This is strong competitive force, because of the quality of competitors in the market. While Google currently has a sizeable lead in the industry, they are not able to rest on their laurels, especially because Microsoft’s Bing, which powers yahoo’s search engine as well, is a formidable rival. Even though they have not been able to gain any significant ground as of...
Words: 700 - Pages: 3
...U081536B Case Study: America Online 1. Prior to 1995, why was America Online (AOL) so successful in the commercial online industry relative to its competitors CompuServe and Prodigy? a. Wide range of products making them more able to capture online consumer needs. b. Continuous addition and improvement to the products and services provided to retain customer. c. Extensive marketing efforts like direct mail packages and bundling AOL software into related products sold in the market to attract new customers. 2. As of 1995, what are the key changes taking place in the commercial online industry? How are they likely to affect AOL’s future prospects? d. New entrants with large financial backing like Microsoft’s MSN makes the industry even more cost competitive. e. The increase in usage of world wide web where people can obtain news or information for free, making AOL’s paid services less attractive. Thus demand for products and services by firms like AOL is growing at a decreasing rate. 3. Was AOL’s policy to capitalize subscriber acquisition cost justified prior to 1995? f. Yes i. Since costs are generated from the life of the subscriber’s subscription period, these cost should be capitalized. ii. These cost truly reflect the life of the actual cost that AOL incur rather than incurring them right at the moment subscription occurs. 4. Given the changes discussed in question 2, do you think AOL should change...
Words: 453 - Pages: 2
...1. The Board of Directors of the firm Day News (a firm which manufactures newspaper) has recently sent its four senior managers on a training course to help find solutions for their problems. They complain that workers are not motivated and that they cannot achieve short-term consensus for any change they propose. At the training course, they were told the following: • mission statements help different people in a firm share a vision • management should introduce change in spite of experiencing resistance • one of the main causes of conflict in firms is poor communication 2. (i) Explain why workers for Day News might be scared of change. (4) (ii) What could the four senior managers do to minimise the fear that their employees show? (4) (Total 8 marks) 3. Top-taste is a medium-sized food manufacturing company. The company faces tough domestic competition. The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and the Senior Management Team have considered both short-term and long-term options so as to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Top-taste is now considering a merger with a considerably larger overseas company that will inject much needed cash and expertise. In an emergency meeting called by the management the employees were told that: • a large injection of money into advanced technology will enable Top-taste to move from “batch” to “flow” production. Work groups will have to be dismantled. • all employees have to take a 3% wage cut with immediate effect. ...
Words: 1685 - Pages: 7
...5.3 Audience Relationship: Emphasize the Positive Revise these sentences to be positive rather than negative. • a. To avoid damage to your credit rating, please remit payment within 10 days. • b. We don’t offer refunds on returned merchandise that is soiled. • c. Because we are temporarily out of Baby Cry dolls, we won’t be able to ship your order for 10 days. • d. You failed to specify the color of the blouse that you ordered. • e. You should have realized that waterbeds will freeze in unheated houses during winter. Therefore, our guarantee does not cover the valve damage, and you must pay the $9.50 valve-replacement fee (plus postage). 5.5 Audience Relationship: Bias-Free Language Rewrite each of the following to eliminate bias: • a. For an Indian, Maggie certainly is outgoing. • b. He needs a wheelchair, but he doesn’t let his handicap affect his job performance. • c. A pilot must have the ability to stay calm under pressure, and then he must be trained to cope with any problem that arises. • d. Candidate Renata Parsons, married and the mother of a teenager, will attend the debate. • e. Senior citizen Sam Nugent is still an active salesman. 5.10 Message Composition: Selecting Words As you rewrite these sentences, replace the clichés and buzzwords with plain language (if you don’t recognize any of these terms, you can find definitions online): • a. Being a jack-of-all-trades, Dave worked well in his new general manager job. • b. Moving...
Words: 670 - Pages: 3
...GBA 490 4/7/2010 Case Report Table of Contents Executive Summary 3 Situation Analysis 4 Recommendations 6 Appendix 11 SWOT Analysis 12 Key Success Factors 13 Driving Forces 14 Increasing Globalization 14 Marketing Innovation 14 Diffusion of technical know-how across more companies and more countries 14 Dominant Economic Features 15 Market size and growth: 15 Number of rivals: 15 Number of buyers: 15 5 Competitive Forces 16 Competitive Landscape 17 Financial Analysis 18 Identification of Rivals 19 Percent of Searches 19 Financial Summary from 2007 19 Financial Summary from 2009 19 Yahoo 20 Microsoft Online Services 21 Analysis of Company Strategy 22 Executive Summary To: Eric Schmidt, CEO From: Tyler Echevarria, Amanda Osburne, & Samantha Smith Re: Strategic Analysis of Google Inc. Date: April 7, 2010 This report will make recommendations for improvement of Google Inc. based on the analysis of the company’s financial resources and industry evaluations. Several analytical tools will be used in determining the direction the company should pursue. These analytical tools and techniques include the following: * Evaluation based on SWOT analysis * Evaluation based on Key Success Factors * Evaluation of Google’s business model and strategy * Analysis of financial data * Evaluation of current industry conditions These tools will be used to recommend new opportunities for Google to pursue as they...
Words: 4116 - Pages: 17
...Ahmed Usman Sheikh 2012400845 BBVA Compass Case Analysis BBVA Compass, the 15th largest commercial bank in the U.S. in 2010 had to effectively utilize its limited budget to meet its strategic objectives using offline and online marketing mediums. Offline advertising mainly consisted of advertising through the traditional mediums such as newspapers, magazines, outdoor, television, radio and sponsor sporting events like NBA and other regional American football events in their most important markets. The primary reason for offline marketing was to connect with the bank’s customer base and build brand awareness and improve consideration among potential bank customers in the core markets such as the Sunbelt region. Online advertising on the other hand consisted of advertising on the internet through both search and display advertising on websites that generated traffic of users from the target market. The main goals of online advertising were to build online brand awareness and acquire new customers for various lines of business (such as new checking account customers.) Through historical data the company had evaluated that the life time value of new checking account (over 5 year period) was $800, hence the objective of the company was to minimize its customer acquisition cost, which the bank effectively managed to do using online advertising. The 2010 budget split between offline and online advertising budget was 79% and 21% respectively. Considering the rise of social...
Words: 492 - Pages: 2
...Internal Memorandum from CEO to all employees Due to the high tech company recent struggles the new CEO of Yahoo Inc is seeing a lot of unproductive workers who mostly work from home who could be the cause of the company’s and as many of you have experienced our pool of participants are decreasing. The biggest concern is how to make Yahoo Inc. the most used search engine and email provider. The ongoing concern has been how to deliver service effectively to all customers when they are using all the services provided by Yahoo Inc. Many of you have expressed that employee time is better managed when there is collaboration, face-to-face meetings and addressing issues as and when they occur. For example, all the cubicles and offices are empty at the Yahoo office because most people work from home. Employees should be available to determine level of service based on continuous assessment to so to meet customers’ needs by identifying why customers are switching to other providers. At last, the CEO of Yahoo Inc., has developed a new policy to address our concerns that are affecting the company’s performance. Due to the advances of technology, such as traffic on search engine websites, email assess, and all search engine services, customers or users are expecting accuracies in services. The CEO is focusing on: hiring the right people, using them to build products consumers love, using those products to bring in traffic, and using that traffic to grow revenue which will eventually...
Words: 719 - Pages: 3
...A Case Study of BBVA Compass BBVA Compass is the fifteenth-largest bank in America. In December 2010, they considered about how to allocate the bank’s marketing budget in order to improve the brand awareness and market share. Based on the data and time line provided in the case material, this essay will use expected Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) to measure customer attractiveness versus customer profitability in their marketing decision making. 1. The role of online and offline advertising. From its marketing purpose, the major role of offline and online advertising was to build brand awareness and improve consideration among potential bank customers. In 2009, the brand awareness and consideration dropped significantly because of they changed their brand name to BBVA Compass. Another role is to bringing in new customers and increasing the total number of accounts at the bank. In this aspect, online advertising has a distinct advantage than offline advertising that is information tracking. This can help BBVA have a good sense of return on investment and thus allocate marketing budget in different channel effectively. Additionally, BBVA also want to utilize online and offline marketing to support its product lines such as checking, savings, mortgage, commercial banking and improve satisfaction and retention of the current customers and cross-sell to them. Because, from a survey, the top-three criteria for customer to choose a bank includes free checking service, convenient...
Words: 1307 - Pages: 6
...4. Google is constantly pushing for growth in their industry. Their Google Plex is set up to spark creativity and they’re constantly coming out with new apps and technology. The problem Google might face with this drive for growth is that when a company gets big and fast by outdoing their competitors, like Google has, it sparks jealousy and excites different parties to capitalize on litigation or reporting on their miscues. Google also has the tendency to hire people rapidly in order to pursue their growth. They may be hiring faster and more than they can handle on their profits. All this being said there has been criticism against Google saying that their Cocky and self absorbed because of all their growth. They feel entitled and elite. I think what’s so dangerous is that Google fosters and promotes creativity in the technological world, which is at the forefront of young thinkers, and is what we concentrate on in our generation. If Google is so quick to feel entitled, and seem cocky while they are still in a potential growth stage then they may be taking young hopefuls, and the genius minds they’re looking for and turning them off with their attitude to go else where. Whether the accusations are true or not if Google really wants to continue to grow they would have to seriously concentrate on their PR and make sure that they maintain a relatable, do no harm persona to keep up a reputation that can foster their growth expectations. 6. Microsoft definitely would...
Words: 399 - Pages: 2
...Google Inc. 1. What were the key factors behind Google's early success? The main reason for Google’s early success was “Thinking big”. The co-founders believed they were able to solve an important problem and ultimately change the way people search for information and this was the driving force for everything that followed. Besides having a clear vision, there were other factors that contributed to Google’s early success: • New search algorithm that provided users with highly relevant results. The search engine did what users wanted it to do: provided results redirecting users to the pages they needed. • Clean homepage design with no distractions. No advertising or sponsored results within search results in early years of the company. That helped Google build trust in the search results it provided: because of no advertising, the results were perceived “unbiased”. The company also actively promoted the fact that the results were never manipulated. • Significant investments into the infrastructure that resulted in extremely fast page loading. Google’s servers supported “cloud” applications. That allowed the company to offer novel services (applications) from one reliable source, such as Calendar, Google’s Reader, Google Photos, etc • Unique corporate image – Innovators, engineers, leaders. The company was so different from its competitors; it stood out of the crowd. • They took innovation as core value to the whole new level. They allowed engineers to spend 20% of time...
Words: 511 - Pages: 3
...Final Project Proposal – Connor Gamble 1. Company: I am going to do my project on Google, and it’s publicly traded stock symbol is GOOG. 2. Synopsis: Google originated as a search engine, but has grown meteorically over the past decade. Besides being the best search engine on the web that is used by most people daily, it has expanded its technology base to be considered one of the most cutting edge companies in the world. Products and services offered by the company include online advertising, could computing, software, searching, location services, laptops, digital maps, shopping, news, and pretty much anything else you could want to find online. 3. Rationale: I chose Google because it is hands down one of the most interesting companies in the marketplace. From humble roots, it has become the face of success on the internet, and has use its profits to fund exciting breakthroughs in new technology, such as google glass and self-driving cars. I am also familiar with how well the company treats its employees, and it has an extremely interesting business model. 4. My role: My role in this company will be a socially-minded stockholder, one less concerned with the bottom line, and looking moreso at the double bottom line. 5. Conclusion: There’s a lot of things I would like to learn from Google. The company has been an innovator ever since its conception, and I would like to potentially soak some of it up. I’m also curious to learn about if Google takes its great...
Words: 271 - Pages: 2
...Shana Pritchett May 27, 2014 Everest University Workplace Continuity & Contingency Planning-1 Corporate Blunder: The AOL/Time Warner Merger CORPORATE BLUNDER: THE AOL/TIME WARNER MERGER In 2000, AOL and Time Warner made the public announcement in what has been the biggest merger in U.S. business history, and it received so much press and hype it seemed that the predominance of internet over previous media was finalized. A lot of people have believed that this particular union was a symbol of an exciting future of collaboration between the worldwide internet and the television. Many of those individuals that was observing this merger foreseen that this would be a magnificent collaboration. And with Time Warner's valuable collection of movies, music as well as printed media that is being presented to the AOL's clientele by the means of the internet. The result of the deal is reminisced less for its dimension and much more for being the poorest amalgamation in history. Ultimately these two corporations split in 2009. In the end, AOL and Time Warner’s worth as a unified company withered down from $300 billion when they initially merged all the way down to what they declared to just about $40 billion when they parted ways. What they envisioned wasn’t a bad decision because we're seeing movies, TV, and music scattered all online by way of Apple, Google, Amazon and others. However, in the collaboration, there were many culture clashes, leadership blunders and effectively...
Words: 304 - Pages: 2
...engine services industry. All three of these aspects of the organization have allowed Google to capitalize on superior innovation and ultimately obtain the majority of the market share worldwide. Overall, the structure, culture, and processes have proven to strengthen Google’s market share and core competencies. However, it is also important to consider the weaknesses associated with these factors. Google’s governance structure for top management consists of the ownership of one-third of the shares but control over 80% of the votes. Although top management only owns one-third of the company, their control over 80% of the votes allows them to stay in control of Google’s future and prevents potential takeovers from investors. In Google’s case, this structure has proven to be a success, as top management has a clear vision for Google and has been able to capitalize on their independence from investors to date. This structure also allows for a significant amount of investment in Google (another two-thirds), without giving up decision control (only 20%). A potential weakness associated with this structure is that with only 20% of votes available to investors, it might be challenging for Google to find proper investors, as they’d simply act as a passenger. However, Google’s clear vision and strategy will enable them to use this structure to capitalize on the future. The corporate culture at Google is one that innovative companies strive for in order to leverage the variety of...
Words: 546 - Pages: 3
