Overview

Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware. The company was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California. Together, they own about 14 percent of its shares and control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An Initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004, and the company moved to its new headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex . In August 2015, the company announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc Google, Alphabet’s leading subsidiary, will continue to be the umbrella company for Alphabet’s Internet interests. Upon completion of the restructure,Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet.

The company’s rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond Google’s core search engine. It offers services designed for work and productivity, email, scheduling and time management, cloud storage, social networking, instant messaging and video chat, language translation, mapping and turn-by-turn navigation, video sharing (YouTube), and photo organizing and editing. The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, the Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system based on the Chrome browser. Google has moved increasingly into hardware; from 2010 to 2015, it partnered with major electronics manufacturers in the production of its Nexus  devices, and in October 2016, it released multiple hardware products for example, the Pixel smartphone,Home smart speaker, Wifi mesh wireless router, and Daydream View virtual reality headset. The new hardware chief, Rick Osterloh, stated: “a lot of the innovation that we want to do now ends up requiring controlling the end-to-end user experience”. Google has also experimented with becoming an Internet carrier. In February 2010, it announced Google Fiber, a fiber-optic infrastructure that was installed in Kansas City; in April 2015, it launched Project Fi in the United States, combining Wi-Fi and cellular networks from different providers; and in 2016, it announced the Google Station initiative to make public Wi-Fi available around the world, with initial deployment in India.