Step 1: defining the industry
Google’s industry is built around the information search provision.
Google’s main industry spans across different products and services where the opportunity is related to the internet (such as Internet, Computer software and Telecoms equipment).
Boundaries- Software boundaries (operating systems, applications, widgets, computer programs), Hardware (computers, tablets, music players, phones, smart watches, glasses), Internet/web based.

Step 2: General environment analysis

Anaylis the seven generic elements:
Demographic
A large number of people are now starting to be dependent on the internet, instead of searching for data in a book, the person would similarly ‘Google search’ their particular question. The internet and web searching has become a necessary tool in modern day society, where most people would be unable to function without this service. This presents opportunity for Google to continue to expand their target market and demographic areas, reaching any population that has access to the internet.

Sociocultural
The entrepreneurial lifestyle is the main quality of Googles work life and work force. The worldwide stations are full of employees who are encourage to take up this entrepreneurial lifestyle and create services that attract more people. This is a way for Google to attract more customers through new and better services.

Global
Google is only able to advance as fast as a country would allow them, some countries have far more restrictions than others, for example China who have censorship laws, restricting people from accessing information.

Technological
Google convergence is a fundamental factor in the search engine industry, being a web search industry isn’t only about the web search anymore, but more of a data resource for media, cloud computing, personal data, apps, geographical mapping, social media and information search. This presents opportunity’s for Google to utilise their services for financial gain through more advertisement through all of these services.
A large baby boom generation is now becoming more technologically driven, it also presents more opportunities for Google to focus on their initiative thinking and services through their physical products; these products include Google mobile devices, apps (applications) and Google glasses™.
Political/legal
Collection to personal data and who has the right to the collected data, Google tracks a person’s movement online and creates ads that relate to those movements and stores it on a personal profile. This could cause some legal issues, if the information is not kept personal or is sold to another company.
Copyright issues are common in this industry, ‘who owns these programs’ who was first to create the app and do other companies have the right to copy their data. It is a common trait for a company to copy another. Google does this well by creating programs that cannot be easily copied, for example Google maps being the best online map program and Apples poor attempt to compete with them with Apple maps back in 2011.

Step 3: The industry environment

Supplier power
Google is a regionally operated company therefore having access to more than one supplier. If the relationship goes wrong with one supplier, they have multiple other suppliers who could potentially take their place. Google has gained the trust of their competitor Microsoft systems, this can be seen in how the majority of the tools in Microsoft systems support Google search programing. However, if Microsoft decided to change their operating systems and not to support Google, it could cause a threat of forward integration.
Supplier power is relatively low, this is due to information on the internet being free, and people can access Google even without supplier support.

Buyer power
Googles good reputation and free service results to operating 75% of the search engine market. Customers use Google services