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Google recently underwent a massive restructuring, whereby it gave itself a parent company named Alphabet Inc. The company however, continues to remain the single most valuable asset within the newly formed entity, as it continues to be in charge of just about all the financially viable products and services on offer from Alphabet, including search, YouTube and Android. The new Google continues to retain phenomenally large market shares in just about every other product it has in the market, and with NFC payments believed to become the norm sooner rather than later, Android Pay is also tipped to be one of the strongest contenders in the sector, even though, it will have strong competition from services like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, AliPay and the like.
Talking about large market shares, Google has now announced that it has as many as six products with over a billion users each. Ms. Ruth Porat, CFO of Google and its aforementioned parent company Alphabet Inc. wrote in the Q3 earnings report, “With six products now having more than 1 billion users globally, we’re excited about the opportunities ahead of Google, and across Alphabet”. Most people would have guessed by now what those six services might be, seeing as they’re probably using at least some of those themselves. YouTube, Android, search, Maps, Chrome and Google Play all take their pride of place at the top of the heap as the most-used services on offer from Google. The Play Store of course, is the latest to have joined the list, when it reached the milestone earlier this quarter. While half of these products and services were developed organically by Google, the other half – namely Android, YouTube and Maps – are the result of acquisitions.
A quick look at the exact numbers will give us an even better understanding of which services from the house of Google are the most widely-used. Android reportedly has as many as 1.4 billion users worldwide, followed by the company’s internet browser, Chrome, which has as many as 1 billion users per month, 400 million of whom apparently use the mobile version of the software. This pretty much makes Google the largest and most widely entrenched internet company in the world, although Facebook also happens to have around 1.4 million users according to reports. Its ‘Whatsapp’ and ‘Messanger’ apps are yet to reach the billion landmark though, with 900 and 700 million users respectively.
Speaking at the company’s Q3 earnings call, Google’s new CEO, Mr. Sundar Pichai, said that the company is already reaping the rewards of having such a phenomenally large installed user-base, even though not all of its wildly popular services directly make the company much money. He pointed out that all its services working together to create an unified and consistent experience for users is what will fuel further growth going forward. “And, by the way, because we are scaling all these apps over 1 billion users, we are building the infrastructure which is what will power our cloud platform externally as well. So in many ways these are all working for us”, he said.