However, once sold and listed, quarterly performance numbers start to permeate the entire organisation. As you say, the needs of making these numbers start to outweigh the don't be evil mantra. And, because the original services were set up with a 'trust us, we're not evil', the gains to be made from tweaking the 'evil' dial up, even just a tiny bit, are quite large.

I'm not surprised the rank and file are committed to the lofty ideals and goals, and they probably will continue to attract new recruits for the foreseeable future. But in order to keep committed to those types of goals, necessarily some profit is going to have to be foregone. That's mighty hard to do.

My guess is that the big event that makes people trust Google less is close, or maybe has even already been but hasn't been disclosed yet. To me, they're in the same kind of space that Microsoft was post-Windows 95 and pre-Windows 98. Everyone still likes them but questions are being asked. Legal intervention is around the corner.

I see privacy kind of like any economic externality. There's no (immediate) price on loss of privacy, so people are happy to trade it away for benefits like free email and social networking. Can you price privacy? Well, objectively we already are when we forgo private services for free ones. You could say we price our privacy at the cost difference between a free service and a paid one.

Also Google+ is being led by Vic Gundotra, who spent most of his career at Microsoft. Do relative newcomers to Google have the same passion about not being evil, and the same norms about what is/isn't evil?

It started as a one-engineer campaign, almost a joke. He'd write the motto on whiteboards in meeting rooms. It spread from there.

I think the heart was in the right place. It seems to have moved.

I don't think anyone believes them to be a charity or a non-profit, but if you could show how a billion dollars in the quarter was not collected (reducing their free cash flow from 2.8B$ to 1.8B$ for the quarter) because to do so would have required sharing 'too much' information about their user's browing habits, or what they stored, how they used AppEngine. They would get tremendous kudos and support from the community and Wall Street would mercillessly pummel them. I mean really, who wouldn't pick a billion dollars up off the floor?

That sort of wall street punishment would depress their stock price, and that would hurt the employees who feel 'better' when their stock options are worth something than when they are worthless. It is a vicious circle.

Remember the discussion in City Slickers [1] when Bruno Kirby's character tries to get Billy Crystal's character to admit he would cheat on his wife if the situation was 'right.' (and by right he generally meant there were going to be no consequences, no one would find out, etc etc.) And at the end Billy Crystal says "God would know." That was a wonderfully crisp treatise on integrity, and it illustrated, the difference between externally applied values versus internally upheld values.

It seems few people in life have the level of integrity that Billy Crystal's character shows, and so the process seems to boil down to keeping enough consequences in place so that employees won't violate a company value, and having the will to fire people who step over the line, even if the company benefitted from their action.

'Don't be evil' is, as many have pointed out, really too squishy to be actionable. But something like 'if you have to choose profit over privacy, choose privacy.' would be. Certainly not as catchy though.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101587/

It's very hard to figure out how much individual feature elements in a huge product or service earn or lose. It's similarly hard to put numbers on the damage to brand done by a privacy violation or breach of trust costs a company. Attempting to guide company ethics via financial metrics just leads to people finding loopholes in the math.

Historically this is precisely why Google has declined to provide any guidance at all. At the time Google starts being able to provide SEC-acceptable guidance on their income I would expect the creative people there will have left.

As WOPR would say, "The only way to win is to not play the game."