MOST
INNOVATIVE COMPANIES 2017
(WWW.fastcompany.com)
PROFILES AND RANK OFCOMPANY |
2.Google
PROFILE
When
Google CEO Larry Page created
a new holding company called Alphabet in 2015, initiatives such as self-driving cars and
health tech got divvied up into new companies, and Google became an Alphabet
division with a sharper focus on internet services and software. Today’s
Google, now led by CEO Sundar
Pichai, still dominates web search and online
advertising sales. It has the most widely used mobile operating system
(Android) and web browser (Chrome). Other venerable offerings, such as YouTube,
Gmail, and Google Maps, continue to be the 800-pound gorillas of their
respective categories.
For
all the areas where Google is a leader, there are plenty of other markets it
covets. In 2016, it centralized its hardware operations and launched its most
ambitious lineup of devices to date, including the Pixel phone, Google Home smart speaker, Daydream View VR headset, and Google Wi-Fi wireless-networking system. It also
introduced Google Allo, a communications app designed to compete with
Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp. And it gave its enterprise group a new
name—Google Cloud—and redoubled its effort to turn that suite of tools into a
formidable rival to Amazon Web Services.
Google’s
nascent Tango project aims to measure physical space without the need for GPS
or other external signals, putting all the technology inside a mobile device
such as a phone or tablet. Tango enables positional augmented reality in any
kind of space—such as your living room—in a way that’s never been possible
before. The implications could be huge--augmented reality apps that allow users
to easily see what a room would be like with or without furniture, for example.
For now, there aren’t many devices incorporating Tango, but they’re coming. The
first Tango phone, the Lenovo Phab 2, launched in November 2016.
These projects may look far-flung, as if
Google wants to compete with everybody. But the overarching idea is to tie
everything together via the company’s areas of expertise—particularly in
artificial intelligence, which powers the new Alexa-like Google Assistant
service. It’s a take on ecosystem-building designed to revitalize Google’s
original mission: organizing the world’s information and making it universally
accessible and useful.
DATA
COMPETITION
PEOPLE
Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai
VALUATION
$539.4 billion
USERS
1 billion+
HEADQUARTERS
Mountain View, California
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