That said, I've put a small number of user-facing easter eggs in publicly-traded MegaCorp code before. In every case, it was an inside joke among devs that the higher-ups never knew about it. The C-Suite is uptight and we definitely would have been reprimanded if they were aware.

Yes, Google is a corporation and yes, Google tries to build a product people want to use.

(Building things that people like is a good thing.)