Managing the Nation

Is Google the potential competitor in terms of Bloggers? Would Google gain market shares after they were successfully distributed among market leaders Technorati, Blogpulse and newcomer IceRocket? Let's discuss the article from Porter's point of view. Although some of the critics would take the case as rivalry among existing competitors, since Google is a well known search engine that could invade search engine markets anytime anywhere and easily attract customers given that Blog search engine is to be offered as a complement to Google's main objectives. But I'd prefer to be more logical and discuss Google's perspective as a potential entrant in view of the fact that the three market leading Blog search engines are considered specialists in this field of interest.
I believe the biggest potential hump that Google would face is in terms of "Bargaining Power of Buyers", relating it to this case "Bargaining Power of Blog Surfers".

• Purchases are large in volume relative to seller sales: As a matter of fact Blogs and Blog Surfers are increasing tremendously in this time horizon since it attracts surveyors, news reporters, students and many other slices of the economy due to its short written analysis, opinions of fact and different criticisms; allowing this product to be well differentiated from old traditional long compositions discussing every single detail that are sometimes proposed to professionals and presented in newspapers. Relating this issue to the case we know that Google has lost a great market share to old established competitors.

• The product it purchases from the industry are standard or undifferentiated: As products are hardly to differentiate and existing competitors are available anytime to offer high quality services, Google must be able to differentiate its services by conferring a high quality of service and user-friendly interface.

• It faces few switching costs: As I mentioned earlier Google should start considering this service as a complement for its well known products and thus gain and attract existing customers by offering other services like Blog surfing.

• The product it purchases from the industry represents a significant fraction of its cost or purchases: As a matter of fact buyers barely pay a significant amount of dollars to access or use Blog search engines, so buyers are less price sensitive which makes it more challenging for Google to attract current customers, unless as mentioned earlier this product was offered as a complement for Google's current customers.
  
  Finally I believe Google should offer more than just Blog search engines, but to reserve the rights to practice more power on its biggest free blogging service as it was stated in the article "Google already runs the biggest free blogging service in the world, Blogger". For example decreasing the efficiency of the leading search engines by applying certain codes for word search among articles.

posted by Managing_the_Nation @ 4:45 AM