Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.
Wall Street read this as a sign of naiveté and bid the share price down. But Google has proven that their focus on the long term coupled with an unwavering moral compass can win marketshare and fuel extraodinary financial performance.
John Battelle blogs that Google, by "its very DNA, does not like to be an editor of content. But in China, it's doing exactly that ... deciding which sites to exclude because they might offend the Chinese government." But this is such an un-Google thing to do, it can't be what Brin and Page believe is right -- they have rationalized, or "thought themselves into it."
From the prospectus:
Serving our end users is at the heart of what we do and remains our number one priority....
Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.
Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective ....
Google is not a conventional company. Eric, Sergey and I intend to operate Google differently, applying the values it has developed as a private company to its future as a public company.
We will live up to our "don't be evil" principle by keeping user trust...
Google's values aren't just do-gooder hype -- they have made the company what it is today. As Battelle says, "there's still time to pull out, guys."