Competitiveness

The competition factor in the information-technology (IT) industry, in particular Internet-based companies, has a relatively brief history. From the standpoint of industry trends, the 1990s have passed into the realm of myth as a period when multiple telecommunications and Internet-based companies entered the marketplace solely or chiefly on account of the reach of technology in the "information age." The big picture of the industry in the 1990s was that emerging computer technologies were meant to facilitate and enable rather than hinder information handling on one hand and have readily available, market-specific, practical utility on the other. As more and more firms adopted high technology as part of their management platform, there was a growing need for and a growing need to plan for capacity, or the ability of a given system to absorb technology-driven innovation and management. Writing in 1997, Ruber (p. 5 53) cites Dataquest to the effect that demand for storage capacity is increasing by 30 percent a year. Implicit in such analyses is that the opportunities for

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y novices on the Internet employ free-text or "relevancy searching," whereby users "simply enter their terms and click the Search button" (Courtois & Berry, 1999, p. 40). Google's advanced-search utility enables users to refine a search, but they need not be familiar with so-called such veteran online search standbys as "Boolean operators" (and, or, not, near) to construct complicated information requests. The simplicity of use, as well as its free-to-searcher structure, were the foundation of the Google business model and technical architecture. That appealed to the early "angel" investors who collectively funded the start-up company with nearly $1 million in 1998 (Marshall, 2004). From its inception, Google differed in presentation and content from other online search engines, with the result that is differences were perceived and experienced as innovations. Consider the GUI of Google: Its home and search screens are clean and uncluttered compared to those of, say, Yahoo--which has but not is a search engine. The GUI of Ask Jeeves.com formerly resembled that of Yahoo but in 2004 changed it to resemble that of Google (Perez, 2004). Even so, the Google screen is distinctive and competitive. On a white background the word Google,
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2935
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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