10 Google Milestones: From Stanford Dorm To Alphabet
In the last 25 years, Google has staked out its position as one of the world's preeminent technology companies by almost single-handedly creating Web searching as we know it. Here's a look at 10 key moments, from its inception at Stanford to this week's Alphabet restructuring.
Google is one of the world's best-known technology companies, in a league with the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and only a handful of others. The Silicon Valley stalwart also rivals most other brands in terms of name recognition and sheer ubiquity.
Think about it: How often does a company's name become a verb?
And yet, we Google constantly, with each utterance of "Google it" entrenching the search engine giant deeper into our lives.
It wasn't always this way.
Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University, the company was officially incorporated in September 1997.
Since then, the company has grown to nearly 60,000 employees and has a market capitalization of almost $395 billion.
Along the way, Google has made acquisitions and released products and services -- not all of them successful -- that have come to define the company as an innovative leader and an omnipresent influence on the way we communicate.
Does anyone even remember searching for videos on the Web before YouTube, or shaking the computer screen in frustration before Google Maps made getting directions a breeze?
[ What's on the horizon? Read which Google projects you should watch. ]
The company has released so many products and services that narrowing them down to 10 milestones is quite a challenge. We think this list at the very least provides an interesting overview of how Google has grown over the years.
"As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one," Page wrote on Google's official blog as part of the Aug. 10 Alphabet restructuring announcement. "As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses. From the start, we've always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have."
If nothing else, Google is never boring. So, with the next chapter of the company laid out in plain sight this week, InformationWeek is looking back at 10 milestones from Mountain View. Let us know in the comments section below if there's a moment or two that you would have liked to see included instead.
(All images courtesy of Google unless otherwise noted.)
In 1995, Larry Page, a 22-year-old graduate of University of Michigan, and Sergey Brin, who was working on his doctorate in computer science at the time, met at Stanford. Brin, a year younger, is assigned to show Page around, and they eventually begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub, which operated on Stanford servers for more than a year before eventually taking up too much bandwidth.
In June 1999, the company issued its first press release announcing a $25 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In the press release, the company identified itself a "start-up dedicated to providing the best search experience on the web."
"Google should become the gold standard for search on the Internet," Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital general partner, said at the time.
Before YouTube broke the Internet for the first time, Google Video was the best bet for finding warring wild animals, vintage NASA documentaries, and videos of people falling off trampolines. Google's acquisition of YouTube fundamentally and singularly changed the way our society communicates. It's the equivalent of AskJeeves suddenly and unwittingly agreeing to host American Idol.
Sure, Google wasn't the first company to offer online maps, but it figured out the best way to do it. Since then, the company has made the Herculean task of mapping the globe look easy. In addition, it has watched as hubristic rivals, such as Apple, have fallen on their faces trying to mount a challenge.
Currently the mobile operating system with the largest installed base in the world, the Android platform grew out of a 2010 acquisition of Android, Inc., which provided the tech basis for Google's development of the open source OS, which is now a major ecosystem of flavors and applications. Only Apple's iOS is its primary rival in this important space. It's no wonder Page and Brin picked Sundar Pichai, who has worked on several major Android initiatives, as the new CEO of Google.
The company's been in the news often recently thanks to some widely reported accidents with its self-driving car project. But the division behind the technology's development, Google X, started with far less fanfare in 2010. Google announced plans to shift control of X Labs from Google to Alphabet as part of this week's corporate restructuring announcement.
Despite the successes, Google has had its share of flops. Witness Google Glass. The company's attempt to bring augmented reality glasses to consumers resulted in early adopters being labeled Glassholes. However, despite the failure of the first edition, the company has faith in the technology. A new edition, aimed at professionals in the healthcare industry and elsewhere, is currently under development.
Some of Google's biggest announcements haven't been acquisitions, but advances in the way the company sustains itself. In 2013, Google revealed plans to invest $200 million in a wind farm in West Texas, bringing the company's total clean energy commitments to more than $1.5 billion. All told, Google's clean energy efforts can generate enough to power all the public elementary schools in New York, Wyoming, and Oregon for a year.
In January 2014, Google announced the acquisition of Nest, an Internet of Things (IoT) specialist that reinvents the less-loved products for the home, such as thermostats and smoke alarms. Nest offers web connectivity and other sophisticated features for all manner of "things" that signal the rise of the smart home, and could help consumers live safer and more efficiently. Clearly, Page and Brin see a future where the desktop matters less, and mobile and other devices will provide the data that fuels the company's core product -- the search engine.
Now it's time for the next chapter. This week, Google announced its latest evolution as a company with the formation of Alphabet, a conglomerate that will directly own several companies that were owned by or tied to Google -- including Google itself -- and will be headed by Page and Brin. Nest Labs, a specialist in home automation and IoT, will be part of Alphabet as well.
Now it's time for the next chapter. This week, Google announced its latest evolution as a company with the formation of Alphabet, a conglomerate that will directly own several companies that were owned by or tied to Google -- including Google itself -- and will be headed by Page and Brin. Nest Labs, a specialist in home automation and IoT, will be part of Alphabet as well.
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