I don't see how Google can go out of business in the next 10 years given their cash reserves. Eg: If they lost 2 billion dollars every year they could still keep doing that for decades.
I'm pretty confident that they'll still be around in some form 20 years from now as well.
I think the cash is an interesting challenge for its own reason though. Historically, public companies that held large fungible reserves like cash, were vulnerable to so called "Wall Street Raiders." These are people who would do the math and figure out that the assets of the company were worth more then the shares would indicate, they would buy up a controlling interest and then take apart the company, paying themselves a tidy profit. Traditionally that can't work on Google because the voting power of the class A stock is so much higher than the class B stock, however if the stock price were to crash, it becomes possible to make a play for all of that cash. The math is convoluted, and the founders need to continue their current steady sales of stock (which becomes class B when they sell it) but that flip happens before they run out of cash. I wonder sometimes if the IBM buyback of its own stock has been a plan to prevent this from happening there.
But timing the demise is secondary to the awareness on the part of the senior management that they can see their demise as a real and tangible thing. That awareness leads to stress and a willingness to do things counter to their established history in order to facilitate that survival and mitigating that threat to their existence.
The original question was "Did their moral compass shift?" and my observation is that the fear of death is a large metallic object which, when it gets too close to ones moral compass, deflects the needle in perhaps unexpected ways.
That Google's fear of dying is growing and their moral compass is being subverted in the name of survival is a hypothesis for a theory that explains their current behavior. I believe that the theory is both testable and falsifiable given information that we'll get going forward. As any good theory should be predictive, this theory predicts that as they fail to find a successful new business to supplant search advertising the ways in which they attempt to make money will become more and more disconnected from what their corporate culture claims to value. Further, if they do find a successful side business, their corporate cultural claims will re-emerge and they will once again make choices based on their cultural aspirations rather than for the sake of additional revenue.
If they continue to do more and more evil things, even after their future survival is no longer in doubt, it will show that my theory is completely wrong, they were simply evil to begin with and dying or not dying had nothing to do with the public shift in their willingness to be evil.
Would you be OK with your local police enforcing the law at 1000 feet? Using a rocket launcher? That's what we're asking the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to do.
No company that actually believes in the maxim "Don't be evil" would participate in such a technology, much less promote it, or worst of all, lead it.
This is just wrong and not helpful to the discussion. Have you read (or even seen thanks to YT) anything about how "drone targeting" by US forces is actually accomplished besides media outrage when a bomb misses? Mistakes are made, but targeting is far, far from indiscriminate. And being "unaccountable" is not exclusive to drone warfare.
"Would you be OK with your local police enforcing the law at 1000 feet? Using a rocket launcher? That's what we're asking the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to do."
If my local criminal network detonated a bomb at my local coffee shop, killing 50, 100, 200 of my friends and family members, and then proceeded to do so every week, yes - I'd encourage rocket launchers from 1000 feet, 10,000 feet or 10 feet if that was the most effective way to stop them.
As I understand it, the call for a drone kill of an insurgent target is made by the JSOC ...or... by a CIA officer in Langley. In the latter, the case for discriminate sufficiency is entirely up to the CIA and its current set of political priorities for that target, which is NOT shared with the drone team or their chain of command, nor with any non-CIA entity.
I've seen no mention that the CIA is NO LONGER killing with drones (which became one of the established practices for drone use in Afghanistan about 5 years ago, IIRC). This program is very much one that Google would serve in targeting drones, which is why I mention it.
No doubt the CIA would claim their reasoning behind each kill order was discriminate. But if my description of SOP is correct and the CIA is still in charge of many drone kills, that makes them unaccountable in any practical sense.
For some background on CIA's targeting of drone strikes:
"Transferring CIA Drone Strikes to the Pentagon" https://www.cfr.org/report/transferring-cia-drone-strikes-pe...
I hold the controversial (and often dismissed) opinion that Google is dying. I assert they are dying in part because they built a company around search advertising before they knew how to build a company, their initial success gave them the confidence and agency to create structural impediments to their ability to do anything but search advertising. And the search advertising market is not only saturated it is getting more competitive as the easy gains to be made there have already been milked for what they are worth.
I support that opinion on the meager evidence of how they more and more cravenly monetize properties that they previously kept free of such things, their repeated failed attempts at building any other business outside of search that brings anything close to the margins they need for their business model to work, and the lack of 'barriers' to other well funded and durable companies from taking away everything that is special from them. (Bing, Uber, Cruise, Facebook, Apple, Etc.) They get less and less per click and they spend more and more to buy more traffic for their search boxes as documented in their financial statements for the last decade.
They have repeatedly come under attack from outside agencies which see their use of, and exploitation of data about people as either anti-competitive or a violation of basic human rights. Those efforts have resulted in fines and legislation that has been cutting off other ways to monetize the traffic of their place in search.
From that misguided perspective, military contracts make total sense. What they have is a tremendous infrastructure that can be wielded by a relatively small number of engineers to do amazing things. For now, that capability is unique. By turning it from a cost center into a profit center (or even a less cost center) it can help them make the profits they need to keep things rolling. When I was working there I got to see what spending 4 billion dollars a year on infrastructure buys you. It rivals what nation states can field, it rivals what the US government can field. Renting that out to a price insensitive buyer for a unique asset? Sounds like saving yourself from dying to me.