The early Google was a small place where the brightest minds applied themselves to the most mundane problems, and the result was awesome. The company had a motto of "don't be evil" when the competition - Micro$oft and Oracle etc - were the epitome of evil, out to crush developers. That was the narrative back then, and the Googlers people knew believed it as much as the masses.
There was a steady erosion of the moral high ground in the second decade of Google, especially around China and the purchasing of Doubleclick.
