ween industries have blurred. Microsoft, which sells the lion's share of office productivity software, has seen that business eroded by cloud-based office software from Google and Amazon, which by virtue of their pay-per-use models offers savings to businesses and consumers over traditional software licensing fees. Netflix, the largest distributor of video in the United States, has competition for its TV and movie streaming from Amazon and Apple. Ama- zon in particular has an advantage through its low-priced tablet. The tablet is a vehicle for downloading books and streaming and downloading TV shows and movies from Amazon's cloud. Cable companies are under pressure from Netflix, and other stream- ing and mobile providers are losing voice revenues in part because of Microsoft's Skype service. Cable TV operators and many of the telephone companies in the United States provide service only or primarily in the United States. (AT&T and Verizon do have a global reach, but only for business and commercial customers.) In contrast, Inter- net companies, while needing to conform to regulations in other countries, are not as restricted by geography and can more readily offer services worldwide. The growth of mobile computing in developing nations provides them with additional growth opportunities. Google's Strategy of Enhancing Service through Acquisition Google is a global technology company that operates what many consider to be the largest collection of indexed information on the Web. It was incorporated in 1998 as the culmination of a Stanford University Ph.D. project by its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The project centered on the development of an algorithm to prioritize the placements of responses to searches. Google's early search service was based on this algorithm. Over the years, Google purchased other companies and patents to improve search results and to monetize search by improving services to advertisers. It has also made Competition, Industry Structures, and Regulations acquisitions as a way to gain 