Before Google Inc. gained the market power, Yahoo has dominated the internet marketing, email, and online advertisement. Later, Google Inc. developed a superior operating platform that won the rivalry between it and the incumbent market shareholder, Yahoo. Even though Google market share grew past 90%, by 2009, in most countries in the U.K., the firm knew that competition was not far. To counter such a competitive advantage, it rival Microsoft Inc. opted to acquire Yahoo, but its $44.6billion was unsuccessful (Edelman & Eiesmenn, 2014). The antitrust war blocked Microsoft’s move, but it was in favor of Google. Microsoft’s strategy of rebranding MSN to Bing was aimed at countering Google’s competitive power on internet search engines, but it was not enough to influence Google’s competitive nature. Yahoo’s move to upgrade its search engine did not convince advertisers because its infrastructure was not good enough.
Apple and Google’s launch of smartphones initiated a tug of wars between even though both firms fought Microsoft that was a common enemy. As Apple and Google expanded their operations, in 2009, Eric Schmidt resigned as a top management official at Google because he had sat on many Apple board meeting. It is from there that Google vowed not to employ Apple employees. To counter this strategy, Apple’s release of iOS 6 prompted the firm to remove Google Maps from all their devises and replace them with Apple Maps. The war against Google’s did not end on firm rivalry, but on regulator’s moves to reduce her increasing competitive advantage. The assistant attorney of antitrust in the department of justice noted that Google was increasing internet monopoly and gaining market power in such a way that it now controls online advertisements. According to her, the commercial way of controlling more than 80% of internet advertisements was not fair to consumers and rival firms (Edelman & Eiesmenn, 2014). On the other hand, The U.S. Federal Trade Commission kept investigating on Google’s strong market share, but the institution did not come up with any legal background to file a competition case against the firm.
