What are some alternative strategies or methods that businesses can use to decide on their investments?

The GE McKinsey Matrix is a nine-cell matrix used by companies for product portfolio analysis. It helps businesses decide where to invest. For Google, we can consider three of its products: Google Search, Google Glass, and Google Plus.

1. High Industry Attractiveness, High Competitive Strength: Google Search. It's in a highly attractive industry with a lot of users and advertisers. Google's competitive strength here is very high, as it's the leading search engine worldwide.

2. High Industry Attractiveness, Low Competitive Strength: Google Glass. The wearable tech industry is attractive with high growth potential. However, Google Glass didn't perform well due to issues like high price and privacy concerns.

3. Low Industry Attractiveness, High Competitive Strength: Google Plus. The social networking industry is highly competitive with dominant players like Facebook. Despite Google's strength, Google Plus didn't attract many users and was eventually shut down.

4. Low Industry Attractiveness, Low Competitive Strength: This could be a hypothetical product in a saturated market where Google doesn't have a unique offering.

Remember, the matrix is used for strategic decision-making, guiding where to invest, develop, or divest.

The GE McKinsey Matrix is a strategic business tool that helps companies decide where to invest among multiple business units or product lines. It evaluates opportunities based on two dimensions: industry attractiveness and business unit strength.

For Google products, the matrix could be applied as follows:

1. Industry Attractiveness: This could include factors such as market size, growth rate, profitability, and competitive intensity. For example, the search engine market, where Google Search operates, is highly attractive due to its large size and high growth rate.

2. Business Unit Strength: This could include factors such as market share, brand strength, technological capability, and quality of personnel. For example, Google Maps has a high market share and strong brand, making it a strong business unit.

By plotting Google's products on the GE McKinsey Matrix, Google can identify which products to invest in (high industry attractiveness and high business unit strength), which to maintain (high in one dimension but low in the other), and which to divest (low in both dimensions).

Remember, the matrix is a strategic tool and should be used in conjunction with other tools and analysis to make informed business decisions.

General Electric (GE) is a prime example of a company that has successfully used the GE/McKinsey matrix for their investment decisions. The matrix was actually developed by McKinsey for GE in the 1970s. At that time, GE had many unrelated products and was not achieving the desired returns from its investments. They consulted McKinsey, and the resulting directional policy matrix was created. This matrix evaluates opportunities based on industry attractiveness and competitive capability, helping GE to make more informed and strategic investment decisions.