My two cents. I worked for a few months in a local social network, a fairly-sized one by the way (second-only to facebook in traffic in our country). The engine

My two cents. I worked for a few months in a local social network, a fairly-sized one by the way (second-only to facebook in traffic in our country). The engineers thought about the company as technology-based, and our work certainly was to develop such technology; we were the bread and butter of the staff, which means that most of the company's workforce was devoted to create software. As for managers and such, they only talked about advertising whenever revenue was directly involved in the discussion, but usually that wasn't the case despite it being our basic source of money, since we were already an established company without funding problems. Most of the time they took the revenue for granted, and the guidelines they gave us were not about ad visibility and such, but about user experience, increasing the time they spent on our site, etc. So, basically, there was a big separation between what we did and where we got the money from. I think that a company is far better defined from the former than the latter, and I'm inclined to think that people in google think the same, even the non-technical staff.