Who is competing with Google?

Answer 1

Google is primarily a search engine used by around 91% of the internet-connected population. It provides website, image, video, books, news, shopping and map searches, as well as translation, email, and productivity web applications. Its search engine sees competition from Yahoo & Bing (Microsoft), who have joined forces to work collectively.

In some countries Google has a much lower market share, especially in China (which censors Google heavily) and Asia where local search engine companies have a much stronger presence.

It has penetrated social networking with Google+, playing catch-up with the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Google Drive cloud storage competes with DropBox, SkyDrive, and others.

Google provides cloud-based apps in competition with office applications and productivity services such as OpenOffice or Microsoft Office / Office 365.

Google has also been racing along in the smartphone market with their open source mobile operating system, Android. This competes directly with mobile operating systems developed by Research in Motion (Blackberry), Apple (iPhone), and phones running Windows Mobile.

In conjunction with their mobile operating system, they have also established a mobile application/media distribution platform, Google Play, which essentially competes with Apple's App Store and iTunes, with Windows Store, and with online media-streaming services such as Netflix.

Nokia was also in the race with Symbian OS and the Ovi store, but as development faltered and Nokia's grip on the market began to slip, they abandoned their own platform and brokered a deal with Microsoft to supply Windows Mobile on their handsets instead.

Google has joined the 'browser wars' with Chrome, to compete with Internet Explorer (Microsoft), Firefox (Mozilla), Opera (Opera Software), and so on.