[ethbr1]

I'd disagree with parent a smidge and say Google turned evil when it became a platform.

When it was a disparate group of products... incentives were generally aligned with the users of those products.

When they began to look at themselves as a platform company (Google search-on-everything, Android, Chrome), that fundamentally broke and they started making sound-platform-business but user-hostile decisions.

So I guess the moral of that story is that platforms will make you rich, but you have to be very careful to enunciate your value priorities clearly to users. (E.g. Apple: "privacy"; Google: "openness"?)