I thought, though, that "being evil" (whatever 
    that means) came from some kind of instinct of survival
    experienced when facing the threat of bankruptcy, or at
    least very strong market pressures. And and it didn't
    seem to me that Google had been facing these yet. 

It's even more difficult than fighting for survival. A publicly-traded company can't just survive, turning a tidy profit every year. It needs to grow at a rapid pace or else those stocks (and therefore the executives' stock options) are useless.

Google didn't need to fight to survive, but they also didn't have the option of remaining "Google, circa 2004" or whatever we think their last year as a mostly-good company was.