There's been a shift in our culture over the past century or so (though mainly, I think, since the 1980s) in how we look at the purpose of a company. It used t

There's been a shift in our culture over the past century or so (though mainly, I think, since the 1980s) in how we look at the purpose of a company. It used to be that a fairly normal, mainstream company's purpose and goals were along the lines of "We make a product or provide a service, and doing that well enough/better than our competition makes us decent money." Nowadays, it seems to be almost expected that the way a company operates is closer to "We are here to make as much money as we possibly can. If that means we have to make a product or provide a service, OK, but that's a necessary evil to the process of making absolutely ungodly amounts of money." Google didn't get where it was before it went to shit because of greed. They got there because of genuine technical prowess, and a willingness to sacrifice possible revenue to provide an improved experience, with things like the bare-bones main Google page (as compared to things like Yahoo!, Altavista, and Infoseek when Google first appeared, which were laden down with all kinds of crap). When greed took over, they shifted from the former mindset to the latter, and that's when things really started to go downhill.