I'm always very suspicious when a company saves easy to count money but pays with hard to count costs. For instance Google just got a little less cool. Everyone and their mother wants to work at Google, and the people who work there love it, and believe in Google's mission. But as it turns into a more standard profit-oriented company they will lose a lot of their kool-aid, and the Google kool-aid is an asset they have worth many billions.

Unfortunately that asset isn't written down anywhere, and the books won't mark down the capital loss from this depreciation. If they did, a lot of these cost cutting measures probably wouldn't look so great.