Google

Now, undoubtedly you would have heard of Google, in fact there's a high chance you use Google for the majority of your daily activities on the web. They own: Google Mail (duh!), YouTube and Google Documents. These are enough to maintain the average users internet usage in a day.

Google has to deal with upwards of 7 billion hits every, single day and that equates to 20 petabytes of data processed everyday. How big is a petabyte? Over one million gigabytes. 50 petabytes would cover the entire written works of mankind in recorded history, in all languages. That should give you a brief glimpse into the enormity that is Google.

A company that in 2009 made over $6,000,000,000 in profit. A company that allows its employees to have 20% of its working day to be used to work on projects they enjoy. It's proved to be a rather resounding success with newer services such as Google Mail, Google News, Orkut and AdSense originating from the 20% of "free time". The most successful internet business in the world and it's amazing to it's employees, that is surely a business model that all companies should adopt.

But none of this compares to their business plan, it really is amazing. They make around 99% of their revenue from advertising in the many forms that they offer it. So it would obviously make sense to encourage people to visit places where their adverts are present.

Now what businesses have Google recently bought into and began focusing their attentions on? Double Click,  Android, Google Docs, AdMob and Google Chrome OS. This is just a minute portion of the 90+ companies they have acquired in the last ten years and in recent times has increased rapidly, with 4 companies bought this month (just a fortnight in!).

The biggest acquisition to date was that of Double Click, an advertising application. AdMob, advertising. And the rest encourage cloud computing, driving more visitors online and to Google's products and advertising. This creates greater revenue, and means any competition that Google has needs to constantly improve it's product, whatever happens though people are drove onto the internet and thus they gain revenue. Ingenius.