[throwaway32]

I never said profit was their only motivation, but it is the reason they are a corporation, and not a charity.

I refer you to the comment above by jey

  What Google "wants" as an entity is different from what the individual 
  component humans want.

Although Sergey is an obviously important influence at Google, he is not Google.

[haberman]

You said profit was the "first" motivation. You haven't even justified that. Saying that a corporation has to at least break even to avoid being a charity is a far cry from your previous grandstanding. Just because a corporation has to make money doesn't mean that money is the "first" motivation for every decision. It doesn't explain why Google (not Sergey, Google) pulled out of China.

[timr]

Um...they chose to go into China in the first place, and they didn't do it for charity work. A lot of people thought that was pretty evil.

In any case, the parent doesn't have to justify anything, because he's stating a relatively well-known argument: in the US, there's an obligation for corporate executives to maximize shareholder value. This point is debated (http://www.linkedin.com/answers/law-legal/corporate-law/corp...), but not to the extent that you're claiming.

[danssig]

They pulled out of China because the government was hacking them! Do you think they had some knight-in-shining-armour reason? That was all just PR.

[kelnos]

I never said profit was their only motivation, but it is the reason they are a corporation, and not a charity.

Not necessarily. To parrot one of the other posters here: saying it doesn't make it true.

You could also argue that being a charity would be a very slow and inefficient means to achieving many of the things Google has set out to do. Being a for-profit corp gets them there faster and with fewer distractions not core to their purpose. I'd even venture to guess that it wouldn't be possible for Google to do what it does as a non-profit.

Sure, profit is a motivation, but it's certainly not the only (or even necessarily primary) motivation.

[TeMPOraL]

An interesting take on the subject by pg:

http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

"That was a surprising realization. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work."