Introduction

Brief Description of the Scenarios

Google is currently the biggest and most popular search engine in the world. Its future is the one of the most disputable subjects in the business community. There are many different scenarios created by the experts from almost evrey industrial sectors like the marketing sector about the future business of Google.

Our group has developed 4 scenarios about the future of Google. These scenarios were created according to the driving forces that might have direct effect to the Google’s success in the future.

Scenario 1

In the first scenario, it shows what could have happened when the law allowed the collection of personal data and sale of the profile info to the advertisement companies. How would Google position itself when this happened i.e. what kind of preparation would Google have in terms of applications, network, etc? Besides that, how would Google benefit the growing hi-fi technology and how would affect that the Google’s future business, online shopping search engine?

Scenario 2

In the second scenario, it shows how things could have changed in a dramatic way if the law had brought restrictions to the personal data collection. How would that affect Google’s business and future plans and also its stock value? Where would Google’s business divert when this happened.

Scenario 3

In the third scenario, it shows how Google might have changed its strategy in case any restrictions brought to the personal data collection by law. How Google’s new applications (Froogle and Gpay) would help it to overcome the bottleneck caused by the privacy issues. What would be the Google’s new role in the online shopping market? Also, it was analyzed whether Google would need any investments for its new business direction.

Scenario 4

The last scenario describes pretty much a perfect world for Google as Google dominated all media in the world and become the most popular information source for almost the whole human race. Without excessive personal data collection and illegal profiling, Google leveraged its huge financial and technological power to invest smartly and finally beat all of its competitors both on and off Internet.

Dominant Driving Forces

When creating these scenarios, following driving forces were taken into account:

• Legislation
• Marketing
• Advertising
• Shopping
• Video on demand
• Internet everywhere

Legislation

Legislation is the most important driving force since the current strategy of Google is to collect as much personal data as possible for its future plans.However, new legislation might restrict any enterprise to freely profiling its customers and their consumption behaviors.

Maketing

Marketing is the key success factor for its popularity and increasing use today and in the future. Therefore, this was also very important when building the scenarios.

Advertisment

Advertisement is an old established giant business but its dominant play field is mainly TV and Radio. Since the use of these sources is becoming too expensive, its current strategy is to change its direction to the ever-developing sector, the Internet.

Shopping

Shopping will always have the biggest attention from the companies since that’s the way they make money and sell their products. Shopping habits and trends of the customers in the future will shape the futures marketing and advertisement strategies.

Video on Demand

Video on demand is a new growing sector. It started to become popular with the growing Internet technology and bandwidth. In the future, customers will start buying their videos, and music on the Internet since it will be much more cheaper because of the low costs of the companies.

Internet Everywhere

Increase of Internet usage and availability will definitely change the habits of people for shopping, leisure activities, learning, etc. Therefore, this was the second most important driving force to build the scenarios mentioned above. Without growing Internet usage and availability, Google’s future plans might get into the danger.