It's difficult if not impossible to quantify, but I'd suggest that google has lost an enormous amount of goodwill through their departure from 'don't be evil'.

It's difficult if not impossible to quantify, but I'd suggest that google has lost an enormous amount of goodwill through their departure from 'don't be evil'. It's up there with the goodwill they've lost gaining a reputation for abandoning products. How much that filters down to the adsense coalface is debatable. But it absolutely affects the choices of top talent about where to work. Facebook is notorious among my coder friends for being a place that has to pay a large premium to attract talent, because of the shame of working for such an unethical company. No company is bigger than its reputation - certainly not a company that serves people, rather than industry. Part of what made Google so popular - so desirous as a place to work and research, was a sense that many of their policies, e.g.: the embrace of open source technologies, open standards for the web etc; were actively good. This belief helped google mindshare enormously. It's absence cannot help but hurt the company in the long term, in concrete financial terms. What they stand to gain in short term embrace of military contracts etc, will cost them not only their reputation, but their place as a major innovator. If it hasn't already, that is.