In just 11 years, Google has gone from a pair of graduate students noodling in a garage to the most powerful player on the Internet—one whose stock routinely trades well above $500.

Its meteoric rise has been driven by its mastery of technology and business strategy. Its Internet search engine and compellingly simple logo captured the imagination of Internet users, pushing one rival after another aside until it ended up with a 71 percent of the U.S. market. And that just happened to be the most strategically important position on the Web. Search soon supplanted the old Web portals as the users' gateway to the rest of the Web. And it set up Google as the operator of a search-driven advertising empire.

Now the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page while they were Stanford students is using that deathlock on search advertising to aggregate power by the day, expanding its reach in a dizzying array of directions at once. It's furiously inventing or buying the next generation of technology to challenge such players as Apple and Microsoft for dominance of the mobile Web to enterprise email and software, music, display advertising and digital books. It even took satellite pictures of the earth to turn its mapping service into a commerce engine.

It is taking on every big company in the tech and media space, from Microsoft to AT&T and Apple. It can’t possibly succeed on all these fronts (or can it?), but no one can afford to assume that he is safe, so everyone is on guard. With a market cap of $174 billion Google can pretty much gamble as it chooses.

The pieces of the Google empire fit together, though. With each piece, Google is trying to create an atmosphere where users feel completely at home in a Google environment, whether they’re on a mobile phone, a netbook, or a traditional PC. And with that comfort level in place, Google will be able to play to its core strength, serving personalized advertisements to those users.

Wall Street’s in love with Google because of its exponential growth. Revenue grew to $21.7 billion in 2008 from $86.4 million in 2001. It’s on track to pass $25 billion this year, even in the midst of the worst ad slump in generations.

But Google is making enemies at least as powerful as it is almost as fast as it announces initiatives or acquisitions, and one expert says the company is in danger of spinning out of control.

“It’s doing the typical thing a company that’s coming up very quickly does,” says Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group, an analyst who has watched the tech scene for decades. “It’s going in a lot of different directions very quickly. With each battle, they pick up a different enemy. It’s got the problem of too much money. The sheer breadth of everything they’re doing is beyond the grasp of any one management team. I think they’re in real danger of building a company that cannot be managed.”

At its core, Google is what Brin and Page envisioned when they started the company in 1998—a service that provides web search. The company, now headed by CEO Eric Schmidt as well as Brin and Page, has more than 19,000 employees and its shares were trading at $547 Thursday. It still spends more on web search than anything else.

And Google absolutely dominates search, with 71.1 percent of all searches in the U.S. in September, despite the introduction of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine as a competitor. It also makes nearly all its money from search advertising, $5.8 billion of its $5.9 billion revenue in the last quarter.

But Google has also launched its mobile phone operating system, the open source Android, potentially alienating such companies as Apple and RIM, which make the dominant smart phones—the iPhone and Blackberry--on the market. It’s introduced Google Voice, which allows users to hook all their phones to one number, drawing protests that it isn’t playing by the telecom rules from AT&T. To go with its Chrome browser, it’s developing a Google Chrome Operating System that will compete with Microsoft and Apple. Google Wave will allow real-time collaboration across the web when it’s fully developed. Google has continued with a project to scan books onto the internet to create a giant new search pool, sparking copyright concerns from authors and governments. It’s developed web-based collaborative word processing, spreadsheet and calendar software for free use by individuals, competing with Microsoft. It bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, which brought in millions of users and conflict with broadcasters and movie studios like News Corp., but so far no profits.

And that’s where Enderle sees a weakness that could come back to haunt Google. All these initiatives without profits yet, and a very powerful cast of enemies gathering.