How Google Became a Star Business

It's a fact. The rich get richer. Big begets big. And giant companies have a much greater chance of succeeding than small companies and start-ups (think Gillette or Microsoft.) So what do you do if you're doing a start-up? How do you position your product or service? If you read my earlier blog article - "How to Start Your Own Star Business in Seven Steps" you will recall that the first step was to take a market and to conceptually cut it up into two parts. So if you think about how Google did it when they started out, they took the crowded search space and divided it into two parts:
1. Search engines where the home page was very crowded with links, ads and news articles (because at that time search was considered a commodity and all these sites like Yahoo, Lycos, Excite etc. wanted to become 'destination sites')
2. Search engines where the start page was empty, clean and uncluttered (there was nobody here and Google decided to occupy this slot.)

Of course, Google's page rank feature was also important. But it was much harder to explain that to a customer than to show up a clean, uncluttered home page.

In trying to cut up a market, it's important to occupy a small segment of a rapidly growing niche and become the leader. When you dominate a small niche, you become the specialist and come across as the guys who really know what's happening in that particular sub-segment. And that's what Google did with search to become a mega-star business.