As one analyst points out: "it owns neither content nor the delivery mechanism. Though a global business, it has no geographical control anywhere in the world. Since nearly all its consumer services are free, it doesn't have the power to raise prices and has no ability to exclude competitors or somehow block access to competing services. It operates in an environment of healthy competition" (Ulanoff 2009). On the other hand, it is difficult to conceive of a company being large enough, at this point in time, to provide the services Google can provide, with such a mammoth scope, and with such ease. By becoming a relative first-mover in the search engine informational technology industry, Google has shut out the ability for others to truly compete with it on the informational marketplace, its critics allege. The fact that its major competitor is clunky behemoth Microsoft tends to belie the image of giant Google crushing innocent, vulnerable competitors. A large company that attracts top-level employees is needed to provide such services, and Google uses its largess to treat its employees and the planet well, and to further research to benefit humanity as well as to generate a profit. Google simply makes a better product, its defenders say. One professor, with no investment in either company, said that for making a class 'wiki' Google was undeniably superior the comparable Microsoft product: "The greatest advantage of the Google system is simultaneous editing. Up to ten editors can work simultaneously in a Google document, and 50 in a Google spreadsheet. Google spreadsheets even offer instant messaging. By comparison, editors lock out others from Office Live documents until they finish. Version tracking is particularly valuable in the Google system since multiple editors can overwhelm the system resulting in document corruption" (Rienzo & Han 2009).

Section 7: Conclusions

Google has become, like Coke and Xerox, part of that corporate elite of products whose brand name is synonymous with the thing itself, in this case the act of searching the web. You 'Google' rather than search a term. Google is a verb, and although some might decry the influence of the web in modern society, there is no doubt it is here to stay: "the popularity of a website" may not be a validation of its quality, argue critics of Google's way of ranking informational resources, yet no website has arisen with a better model (Harvie 2009). Google's potential for monopolization must be watched...

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