I define dying as being on a path toward non-existence. And I agree that given their cash it can be a very long very slow path. Sort of like Xerox or IBM or even Yahoo!. And just because there may be panic in the executive cubes because none of their strategies have worked so far, they may in fact find something to reboot them, wiser and stronger than before. Microsoft seems to have pulled it off and all it required was replacing the senior management and tossing out everything the company originally held sacred (like the Windows franchise). IBM has done it in the past but are struggling in this round.

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.